Don't Say This To a Cancer Survivor

Seriously

Growing up with four brothers meant sharing everything.

Clothes were handed down. Bath water was re-used. Even names were recycled when Mum wanted to yell but wasn’t sure who’d committed the crime. Connecting our names, rapid-fire style, meant the culprit would be identified sooner or later.

Four of us even shared a bedroom from when we were young until we individually moved out.

Once, when I was little, I woke up sick and vomited all over the door handle (and my hand) while trying to wake Mum in the next room. None of the other boys offered to help (I don’t blame them), and with Mum sleeping soundly, we were trapped inside by a vomit-coated door grip.

If dementia comes calling someday, I hope it takes that memory first.

Looking back, I guess we didn’t share everything since I got leukemia while my four brothers didn’t, and I think that’s what Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Less Travelled’ is about.

I was busy wondering how to get girls to notice me during high school English class (I didn’t figure it out, still not sure), so I’m not 100% sure.

My cancer experience was the definition of brutal, but I got through it, and life continued — although reminders pop up. Last week, one of my brothers got the flu and sent me a message saying:

“Cancer must have sucked. I’m so sick right now, so I know what it must have felt like for you” 📱

Reading that text pissed me off.

You weren’t there, man.

I don’t ask to be treated with pity when people hear about my health challenges, and I try not to wallow in pity because of said challenges.

Bad things happen all the time, and there’s no way to compare them objectively.

People dive into swimming pools, bonk their heads on the bottom, and end up in wheelchairs.

Other people dive into swimming pools at a backpacker’s hostel, and the worst that happens is their shorts get pulled down and their penis comes out, and a group of cute girls sitting poolside giggle and look away (literally, the two worst outcomes at once), but that’s a fake example and nothing that happened to me.

*If that was me then I figured out how to make girls notice me. 16-year-old Alexander would be proud… and horrified.

But there I was, feeling annoyed that my brother had tried to compare his head cold to my cancer.

This wasn’t the first time I’d let the seductive allure of victimhood drag me into bed and refuse to let me leave until I threatened to vomit on the door handle.

The first three to five years of remission were a collection of me feeling sorry for myself, refusing to talk about my deep depression and mental anguish, and then picking fights with my high-school girlfriend for not being able to read my mind.

No one is born an elite athlete… as far as I know. There are no baby quarterbacks in the NFL or 6-month-olds guarding Lebron James on the basketball court. Advanced skills, like cooking a roast, take time.

Emotional maturity is one of those skills.

Problematically, I assumed I was cured in every sense of the word in the immediate aftermath of my cancer treatment.

Physically I was fine (minus a few scars that would hopefully one day distract a group of girls from looking at my penis, giggling and looking away).

Mentally I was a Vietnam War veteran hearing the sound of a helicopter passing overhead and getting ready to freak out on the poor Vietnamese baker just trying to make his Bánh mì.

I didn’t anticipate that the mental side of my cancer treatment would be the hardest to overcome. Eventually, you stop vomiting into a sick bag during chemo and go home.

As it turns out, when you walk out the door and back into your old life, there’s a monster in your mind that comes with you.

I got better at getting better.

I don’t have a roadmap to navigating post-cancer life — though it’s something I’d like to figure out one day in case someone else needs it.

I used a combination of running away from my problems, travelling a lot, highly promiscuous behaviour and getting tattoos. I wouldn’t recommend it for every cancer survivor but I also wouldn’t not recommend it because all those things were pretty fun.

As years passed, the mental side got easier to manage.

It was like I was walking away from a car crash and every passing day put distance between me and the impact. After a few months, I couldn’t hear the scrape of metal, the shattering of glass, or smell the burning rubber. After a few years, the lick of flames on my skin was all but erased.

In the past, when people made direct comments about their lived experience vs. mine, it was like I was back in that moment. Back inside the car, screaming for help, burning alive.

When someone would tell me they had suffered like I had, my first instinct was to reject them. To demand they show their scars. To prove that they pulled themselves out of a wreckage and clawed their way to safety before everything blew the fuck up.

Can I be honest with you?

It took meeting another leukemia survivor to help me shed my sad second skin.

Like me, he had Acute Myeloid Leukemia. In layman’s terms, that’s a shit one. Like me, he endured months of rough, body-shaking chemotherapy. And like me, he came out the other side and tried his best to get on with life.

The difference between us was that his body suffered and mine did not.

He’d been forced to endure a bone marrow transplant which his body rejected. He came out the other side with permanent damage to his lungs, chronic illnesses that would be with him for life, and facial scarring that completely changed his appearance.

Before I met him at a Leukemia Foundation fundraiser, I’d had a twisted idea that I’d be extra special in survivor circles because my cancer was so deadly. After speaking to him, and seeing we shared the same diagnosis, that maladaptive mindset was gone.

I can’t lie… he was the nicest damn bloke you’d ever meet. He wore his cancer experience proudly and lacked any sense of victimhood despite the obvious — and no doubt invisible — reminders he carried. I got the sense that what he’d been through had shaped him, but he refused to let it define him.

He was, as I came to realise, who I should be.

I’m on the same journey you are.

Those feelings were a long time ago.

If you’re anything like me, there’s a past version of you that you’re not proud of. It’s easy to sweep that person under a metaphorical rug and drag a heavy cupboard over it. That’s the easy option — but not the right one.

Don’t go around reminding people you were an asshole. But don’t let yourself forget. It’s much easier to stay focused on who you want to be when you can see who you’re leaving behind.

I try not to gatekeep bad shit because I didn’t win a twisted, inverse Olympics by getting cancer. You, me, all of us have a cross to bear. Sometimes those challenges are obvious and other times they’re unseen. Both weigh down your soul. Both are exhausting.

Fifteen years on from my cancer experience, I try to keep that in mind.

I apologise for the misleading headline because the truth is the other way around.

It’s the cancer survivor who should never say to you that their experience was worse than yours. It might have been more painful, scarier, or involved an alarming amount of diarrhea — but no one else’s challenges diminish yours.

I’m sure my brother’s head cold sucked. It probably wasn’t on the pain and fear scale as leukemia, but there’s no value in gatekeeping sadness. I don’t feel better by being the best at being the sickest. We all win when our loved ones do.

Looking back on where I’ve come from, I’m overwhelmed with appreciation for who I am now. I want to reach through time and tell the jaded, angry Alexander that everything will be OK, that he’ll find a place — mentally and physically — that’s manageable even if it’s not truly comfortable.

I doubt he’d listen, but that’s OK.

Maybe, all of us have to go through the wars before we find our peaceful place. Maybe the war never ends, and it’s about finding peaceful moments. It doesn’t really matter which is true. As long as you can find space to be kind to yourself and others — no matter what you’ve been through — you’re doing life right.

Picking up my phone, the urge to snap back about his poorly thought-out text fades.

I respond, “That sucks! Let me know if you need anything” and put the phone down.

I can’t hear the scrape of metal or the shattering of glass. It’s silent outside. It’s peaceful.

With love,

New World Porter

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