Day +3: A Short Note On Compassion

I'm learning a lot about compassion. For the first ten years of my diagnosis, I was a very boring cancer patient, with normal labs and slow growing tumors. Except for about ten weeks spread out over those years, my cancer was for all intents and purposes, in the background. It loitered there unnoticed. That changed in July 2022, when it transformed, and decided it would like a little attention. 

And it's gotten plenty of it - an uncomfortable amount of it, if I'm honest.   

Over the years - and in particular since I lost my parents in 2016 and 2020, I've grown more grateful --for the family and friends I have, for the work I get to do, and in short, for the life I'm lucky enough to lead. Gratitude seems to grow alongside your gray hair and it feels relatively easy to be grateful, if harder to show your gratitude.  Compassion though seems a bit tougher. 

I've always tried to be a nice person. But that's just a steppingstone to compassion. Nice is giving up your seat on the subway to a person who needs it; compassion is knowing that the person in your seat needs help navigating the subway, and you help them. It's the difference from being polite but detached to being present and selfless. 

I've felt so much compassion -- from my care team, yes, but also importantly from my friends, family and colleagues -- that it's really hard for me to embrace the outpouring. I worry that I won't be able to reciprocate when the time comes; or that I'm not worthy of their compassion. These are silly thoughts, I recognize that,  and I'm not begging for validation here. Just an observation that it's a bit overpowering if wonderful to receive all this -- and that it pushes me to be more compassionate in all that I do. To borrow a bit from Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, it makes me want to be a better man. 

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On the more mundane front, I'm at day +3 (day zero being when the stem cells were infused) which has me tethered back to my friend the infusion pole. It's the start of a chemotherapy agent doing duty as an immunosuppressant. My counts are dropping as expected, and so we remain on course.