My Name on a Bus

The other day I overheard a lady on her cell phone saying, "well, dear, you just can't waste time worrying. You could walk outside tomorrow and get hit by a bus."

Easy for you to say, I thought. You aren't the one standing in the middle of the street watching the bus speeding towards you with your name in bright orange lights scrolling across the front.

Its easy for people who have never been faced with a life threatening illness like cancer to tell you that its silly to worry about dying. That its a waste of the life you fought so hard to get back.

When I was working at the Lance Armstrong Foundation, I talked to hundreds of cancer survivors. Men, women, children who had different types of cancer at different stages of life. I always hated interviewing the hopeful types who went on and on about how cancer was a gift that God gave only to special people who would be touched by a greater appreciation for life.

I used to abruptly change the subject when survivors quoted Winston Churchill, "it's not the beginning of the end but it is perhaps the end of the beginning." I just didn't understand why people used complex terms to describe such a crappy experience.

I met a 70 year old man who was very bitter about his prostrate cancer. The man said, "after everything I have been through, the war, the divorce, my kids' problems, I can't believe its my damn wiener that's going to do me in." Now that was an outlook I could understand.

There was another young woman, a few years older than me, who shared her fears of recurrence. Fears that cancer would kill her sooner than she was ready to die. Someone had told her not to worry because while she was lost in worrisome thoughts about the cancer coming back a bus could come right up and kill her while she crossed the street.

I will never forget what she said, "I told that person that when I sat in the room and the doctor told me I had cancer, it felt like I was hit by a bus. And then every week when I went in for treatment, it felt like the bus was backing up and hitting me over and over again. And it hurt. A lot. So if I want to worry about dying or if I want to sit on the side of the road all day just to make sure a bus doesn't hit me, then that's what I am going to damn well do." I really liked her too.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of night and am immediately brought to tears at the thought of dying. Of leaving my husband and my children and my parents and my siblings. It takes less then a second for those fears to overcome me. Its not because I am a pessimist, or because I worry too much, or because I suffer from severe anxiety and depression.

Its just because every day I live with the knowledge of what it felt like when I thought I wasn't going to live the life I always took for granted. Every day, I can't help but wonder if there might be a bus driving around the corner with my name scrolling across the front in bright orange lights. I saw it once before and it hit me pretty hard. Some days it motivates me to appreciate life to the fullest but some nights it just brings me to tears.