Luxury!

I've just watched a Youtube video of Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" - the comic farce of trying to top each other's "hard luck" stories of growing up. Jen being diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer was a bit like that, but without the humour. Telling people who hadn't heard was a terrible moment repeated many times, bringing with it the sense that our bad news had trumped whatever bad news that person might have had themselves.

Indeed at times there is a temptation to a lack of compassion - to think to ourselves "what are they worrying about, when Jen has breast cancer". This even happens sometimes when we read the stories of women being treated for early stage breast cancers - what are they worrying about, lump the size of a pea, when Jen has a lump the size of a tennis ball! In that moment we are only belittling ourselves, since there was a period of three weeks when we thought Jen has a stage 3 cancer, with five year survival odds of 70%, and that was extremely grim, even though now it seems like luxury (to quote Python). There's also the annoyance at people who smoked, drank and abused their bodies for decades and are still alive at 85, whereas Jen's worst vice is probably chocolate, and we'll be thrilled if she makes 45.

The compensating moment is when we read a far worse story than ours. The book "It takes a worried man" by Brendan Halpin, details the story of his wife Kirsten's treatment for stage 4 breast cancer. At the time of writing she was about 30, and they had one young child. It immediately made me glad that Jen is 40 and that we have have children who are older. Then we started thinking -- isn't it good that we don't have a 1 year old when this is happening, isn't it good that Jen's still alive and we have time together, isn't it good we live in a place and time when life expectancy is 85 not 35 etc etc. Those are positives and we are grateful for them. Brendan Halpin describes an incident when he opens an umbrella inside, and a Haitian student of his warns him about bad luck. He says "My wife has breast cancer -- what could be worse than that?" and the students says "Well, you could be black".

But when we've counted all your blessings, it's still true that stage 4 breast cancer is a bad thing to have. Things could be worse and they could be better. But I've also realised that our friends have been going through a parallel process, thinking "I can't complain about the painful things happening to me, because their situation is so much worse". Now it's true that our perspective has shifted a little, and some issues that seemed big have now been assigned to the file marked "not life threatening". Yet we really do want to know all the normal and ordinary news of our friends' lives . Firstly because we love you, and what happens to you is important to us. What's the point in surviving if you abandon everything of value in the process? Secondly because we also share some of those same everyday issues alongside our big issues. Thirdly because it's a relief to be able to turn from our pit of dread, contemplate the ordinary worries that we too had before September 15th 2008, and say to ourselves "Luxury!"