The forgotten

Drug companies are on a quest to find better drugs to cure cancer in people and alleviate the pain in people who are dying from it.

Research oncologists are looking for new ways to increase the chance of surviving cancer and creating new 'cutting edge' ways to treat people with cancer.

The news is encouraging.

Cancer survival rates are ever increasing and slowly but surely, we are making strides in ridding the world of this disease.

Cancer strikes the young and the old. It does not discriminate if you are male or female. Nor does it care how much money you make or how much family you have.

I've been in remission now for over 2 years and while I feel that the scientific advances made in the cure for cancer are impressive, there are sacrifices being made in the quest for a world without cancer.

One of those sacrifices is people like me who are 'survivors'.

Maybe its just me, but I find that once I received 3 clean Ct scans, I was hustled out the door and told to give 'them a call' if I was symptomatic.

I am not the only one who made it past the finish line and I'm surely not going to be the last.

I am another statistic in the 'seers' database where all cancer treatments are kept track of.

My name is never recorded but I know that I am somewhere in the 3144 people who were diagnosed 2 years ago with my type of cancer and now I am in remission and considered cured.

Cured is defined as having no 'evidence of disease.'

I roam the earth with others deemed 'cured' and we aimlessly wander around with no guide to show us the way or help in the form of actually living with cancer instead of dying from it.

I get up in the morning and go about my day and I wait in silence.

The phone does not ring from my oncologist wondering how I'm doing.

I do not hear from the social workers who were so concerned about my mental state 2 short years ago.

Everyone one assumes that being deemed 'cured' alleviates all of my concerns and I sometimes feel guilty for occasionally feeling doubt that I am really cured.

Late at night, I peruse 'cancer' forums and I always click on the posts referring to people who are dying.

I look for signs in their words that will give me a clue if my cancer is now back as well.

Night does not come easy to me sometimes. I awake in a sweat on occasion having woken from a nightmare where I'm told that the beast has come back.

In an ideal world, there would be 'after cancer' support to the millions of people each year who don't get a death sentence when they hear that they have the dreaded 'c' word.

There would be a place where we can go to get help or encouragement or just sit with others who are afflicted by having survived cancer.

The world needs to know that once you survive it, you are never the same.

The world needs to know that getting a second chance also comes with the price of knowing what you really do have to lose.

I get emails from people all over the world reaching out to me for comfort because I've been where they are right now.

There are multiple sites online where you can get scientific data relating to our disease.

We can look at statistics and new treatments emerging that might help us if we ever get our cancers back.

Sadly, there is very little in the way of support and treatment for the 'mind' of a cancer survivor.

We live with guilt not knowing why we lived and a little boy of 4 did not.

We live with the sound of a clock ticking in the back of our minds signaling the end where most would never hear the clock ticking at all.

We deal with the unknown of symptoms from the very treatments themselves who saved our lives.

Every cancer is different and every treatment is different.

My pelvic radiation increases my chance of a hip fracture by 400%. I had to read this. I was not told this.

The whole world is based on what happens 'now' instead of what might happen 10 years from now.

There is less data collected on the after-effects on having been treated by IMRT radiation than what happens during getting IMRT radiation.

We, as survivors are left to roam the world as 'cured' cancer victims.

We are not marked in scarlet letters. We do not glow from the radiation we received. You could walk down the street and not know when you passed me by, that I had cancer.

Its as if it didn't exist at all and I wander in a sort of 'oz' type life.

Its as if its put up on a shelf in a plain, brown papered box and its forgotten.

I am forgotten.

We never speak of the horrors of our 3rd degree burns and we never say how hard it was to get up on the table to have more of it every day so we could live.

We wake in the morning and get ready for work while our hips ache from the effects of having radiated hips.

We go to bed early some nights in a sweat of unknown origin that we know is from chemo that took place almost long enough ago to forget it ever happened.

We walk the earth as heros for having survived and yet sometimes late at night, we cry in silence.

We cry for the death of an innocence that we lost long ago in happier times.

We cry for change. We should not wander alone.

No one should never feel alone and yet we do.

The world needs to hear the stories of survivors. It needs to hear the ups and the downs.

We cannot continue to sweep it under the carpet because we are too scared to hear that there are indeed prices to pay to get a second chance at life.

There is always a price to pay for everything we do.

The big drug companies have to realize that yup, you cured me but unfortunately, I have issues that I live with everyday because I survived cancer.

The oncologists have to hear that although I no longer have cancer on a CT scan, I will always have cancer in my mind.

The end of treatment for cancer and being declared cancer-free is a reason for celebration.

Unfortunately, after the cake is all gone and the hugs have been given and you go on your way home after relishing in your friend's 2nd chance at life, please remember that although the cancer is gone, the cancer survivor is not.

They still are forgotten.