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Survivors' Stories
Story Archives
Louana's Story
Funny, I don’t look like I have cancer!
I get up in the morning and do my usual shtick. Look in the mirror, check out my face, look at my teeth, search for stray hairs needing a pluck and I muse, “Funny, you don’t look like you have cancer.” What is it I’m looking for—what is it I should look like, this cancer me? Maybe I think cancer looks like that which we see of an end stage AIDS patient, drawn and emaciated. But I don’t see anything more than the usual me. I tell people I have cancer and they look horrified and shocked. Some people move away from me either subtly or not, as if I’m somehow contagious. I both want the cancer to show; it’s so all consuming of my mind, and I don’t want it to show. I’d like to just live a normal life like everyone else. The cancer has, of course changed my life indelibly and forever.
I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, stage 11 (b) in October, 2005. My prognosis is good. My lymph nodes were clean, my recent CT scan was clean and my CA 125 tumor marker is an 8. However, despite the good test results, I will forever have cancer. My cancer is not in the present, not in the past, but in the heaviness of knowing that it could come back and probably in a different place and maybe in a different form. And then again it may be just a moment in time that I had cancer. Maybe so. Maybe so. Still, it hangs in the air, the cancer thing. Too positive to live as if I will die from cancer tomorrow and not too stupid to think I could never encounter it again. My days now must count in ways they never did before. Yes, cancer has changed my life forever in strange and good ways. I have cancer; I don’t have cancer. And when I look in the mirror, I simply look like myself. Funny that.
