What Do You Want For Christmas?
“What do you want for Christmas?”, or since my birthday falls a week before the big day, “what would you like for your birthday?” In my childhood days, I had no problem rattling off things that I would like to have for both occasions. In my adulthood however, nearly all of it, my answer has always been simple to me, frustrating to others, time.
I love this quote from John Lennon. Asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Lennon answered simply, “happy.” When I get asked what gifts I would like for either a holiday or my birthday, I answer “time.” Happiness was important to Lennon. Time is important to me.
I stopped longing for material things at the age of 22, when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Things no longer mattered to me. All I wanted was simple, more time. All I knew about cancer, was that people died from it. As I reached remission, my feelings never changed. Survivorship became about making a magical “5 year survival mark” as if any time after that did not matter, because it rarely got discussed.
But as my survivorship term increased, now by the decades, there is also a reality, and only reaffirms the only thing I want for these special occasions. Treatments that I went through to put my cancer into remission, over time, have caused, and continue to cause cumulative damage. I have had three heart surgeries, a surgery to repair my carotid artery, and two episodes of aspiration pneumonia that went septic. That makes six, SIX other events in my life, besides my cancer that have put my life at risk.
Since my cancer days, these six events put me in a position, that I was not prepared for, nor thought I had the ability, or the fortune, to survive. The reality, is there will be likely more of these events.
Over my years of survivorship as a peer to peer counselor (I counsel fellow cancer patients and survivors), there have been many survivors whose bodies had gone through so much trauma, their bodies could take no more. They had run out of time. As I write this post, I mourn yet another one of those survivors, a special one to me, as she was one of the first I met, way before Facebook, and on the other side of the country. I will share my tribute with her as her own post, as she deserves. She, like so many others, were also younger than me. Time. I wish she, they, could have had more. There was so much more for them to experience.
So yes, when I get asked, “what do you want for Christmas?” or “what do you want for your birthday?”, I respond, “time, more of it.” If there is one thing I have learned about cancer and its survivorship, I have no control over what happens, and I live each day with the purpose of enjoying it. But as my daughters prepare to enter the next stage of their lives, adulthood, I want to see more. And that means, that I need more time. Everything else will take care of itself.
Paul's Heart 