If anything positive will come from my wife’s battle with breast cancer is the confirmation that patients learn they are not alone.
I myself became aware of this fact several years ago when I was diagnosed with Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep disorder. I don’t go into the deepest level of sleep, leaving me with night-long dreams that are sometimes nonsensical, most times boring, other times thrilling and all too often angry or frightening. The lack of true restorative sleep will someday kill me, either by heart attack or stroke. Many times when I share this information I will find how many people have some form of sleep disorder or know someone who does.
After my wife announced she had breast cancer, she was surprised by how many have been treated for some form of cancer and survived.
The saddest connection came about through my storytelling at a farm near home which has a sunflower maze in the spring and a cornfield maze in the fall. Next my tent was a family which sold kettle corn. Soon the daughter gave me a bag of corn to munch on during the day. After a few seasons the mother brought the bag of corn to me and shared the fact that her daughter was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. By the time the next season rolled around the daughter had passed on but the mother still gave me kettle corn because her daughter really liked my stories. Now my wife is battling breast cancer, and the girl’s mother gave my wife a wonderful bag of supplies that she knew from her own experience my wife would need.
Cancer is terrible; the friendships that are forged through mutual suffering are priceless.