Your Gift Of Witness During Our Battle With Cancer

Mike and I went out to a lovely Italian restaurant in Byron Bay this week to celebrate the official last day of Mike’s final cycle of chemotherapy. It was delicious. All of it – the food, the salty ocean ambiance, the knowledge that Mike wouldn’t be heading back to the treatment center the next day, the leisurely two hours at the dinner table without once having to instruct a two year old to sit down/stop yelling/don’t pour/and for the love of all that is holy eat some of your dinner!

Also, did you know that if you go to a nice restaurant and tell them you’ve just finished chemo and that your taste buds are all out of whack, they’ll bring you samples of the wines you might want to order so that you can taste them first? Win! Of course, if you want try this at home, folks, it will probably help if you’re bald and look a bit gaunt. Also, please note that if you do this, you will likely end up ordering the most expensive wine they bring you to sample. So will your partner.

This week we’ve been slowly tracking back towards normal. Mike’s still battling a number of chemo side effects and we know that it’ll be months before he has most of his energy back, but I’d say most days are one step forward (or at least a couple of inches). We have made some huge steps forward psychologically, though. We’ve booked tickets to leave for Laos again on April 29^th, Mike plans to return to work there in early May, and in the spirit of speaking Mike’s love language I even sat down with him the other day and made a huge to-do list covering everything we need to do and buy before leaving.

The countdown is on, and the mood has definitely shifted away from simply enduring the present towards planning for the future.

In the new space that shift is opening up for us, I wanted to pause for a moment and say “thank you.”

Thank you for tracking with us so closely during the “enduring the present” phase – for standing with us as witnesses.

Downstairs near the kitchen in the McKay Cancer Rehabilitation Centre (also known as my parent’s house) we have a big playpen set where we can deposit Baby Ravenous (aka Alex) sometimes when we need to attend to normal life.

Alex would much rather we ferried him around on our hips like a small, rotund Maharajah. He is generally not a fan of being deposited anywhere outside the central action or more than two feet away from food. Most of the time when we put him in the pen he pulls himself up on the bars, roars his displeasure, and begins wailing to be fed (or, at the very least, picked up).

The other day I noticed that the first thing both my mother and I usually say to Alex when we have our hands full and just can’t pick up His Royal Heftiness right then and there is this…

“I see you, Alex. I see you.”

When we can’t give Alex what he really wants, we instinctively offer him what we consider to be the next best thing – the reminder that he isn’t alone, the reassurance of our witness.

None of you had the power to “fix” things for us during these last few months. Instead, the stats on my blog tell us that literally thousands of you have offered us the gift of witness. You read these stories. You emailed, commented, pressed like on Facebook, and shared links. You sent a gift, a card, or a note. You shared your own stories, and your hard-won wisdom about surviving cancer and chemo. You assured us of your best wishes, your thoughts, and your prayers. You stayed silent, but you felt for us.

You saw us.

I’ll be honest. I still would have taken an offer of escape from the temporary holding pen that cancer had placed us in. But in the absence of that, the companionship of your compassionate witness helped. It helped a lot.

It helped me on a personal level. I generally write first and foremost for myself – to sort out my thoughts and feelings, and because I must write or I go crazy. But knowing that you were watching made me work harder than I would have otherwise to distill my experiences and dig down towards meaning.

And knowing that you were watching, and how we were touched and helped by the stories and wisdom of other cancer survivors and their loved ones, gave us hope that some good would come out of this awful season.

Somehow.

Someday.

So now that we’re out of the holding pen and crawling our way back towards normal, let me just say this.

Thank you for seeing us.

If you’d like to read more about Mike’s diagnosis in Thailand, our hasty departure from Laos, and what the last couple of months has been like, you can CLICK HERE for the first post in the series and start from there.