A Cause for Celebration

For most of you out there reading this — hopefully all of you, for that matter — October 3 is, was and always will be just another day. Such is not the case for me. In fact, it's one of the more significant days in my whole year now.

For me, October 3 marks an occasion many are familiar with, but thankfully, the majority never experience. It can come on any day of the year, but those of us who experience it will always know when it is. You may have heard it referred to as a cancerversary, or even a life day. but I refer to it as my second or other birthday.

Such a day is one that anyone who experiences it can firmly agree is one worthy of celebration in some form, but for many of us, it's also an occasion filled with mixed emotions. Whether it be due to the almost inevitable guilt associated with someone close to us who didn't have our same outcome, the fact that knowing what could have been is always a sobering feeling, or any number of other reasons. there's often a measure of sadness mixed in with the joy.

For me, it's always been a bit of both. As I approach the fifth anniversary of the day I was officially added to the list of people with the title "cancer survivor," I can't help but think not only of others who found themselves in the opposite position and the impact that had on their loved ones, but that I could have been among them.

Survivor's guilt is a condition common to people who have survived such things as cancer or other traumatic events in life when others didn't and I'm no stranger to it. One particular incident from my past drives that guilt, and despite the fact that I know on an intellectual level that it's a baseless feeling, it still hits pretty hard this time of year. That incident happened just three months after I graduated high school in 2006.

Throughout my first three years of high school, I knew a guy named Derek who was diagnosed with bone cancer when he was 16. Despite fighting debilitating pain and fatigue from the disease and the treatment alike, I almost never saw him without a smile on his face in the whole time I knew him. He was a year ahead of me and after he graduated, I had lost track of him and how he was doing until roughly a year later when I was informed that despite having fought with everything he had and doing it with a smile on his face, he didn't win that fight.

At the time, I took it hard, because he was someone I deeply respected for a number of reasons and I knew he didn't deserve such a fate. Ever since I got cancer and beat it, thinking of him has brought a whole different monster out of me. I know its unproductive and probably not even true to think this way, but I often find myself wondering why I lived and he — a better man than me — didn't.

Not only do I know that mentality and manner of thinking isn't productive for me, but I also know I'm not alone. Many people in my position have similar thoughts, but as someone who's been there many times and all but certainly will be again, I think I have it on pretty good authority when I say it needs to stop.

If you're like me and you have your own second birthday, whether it's coming up in the near future or not, go celebrate it. You know as well as I do, that's exactly what whoever you're thinking about would want. Not only that, but they'd celebrate it with you, regardless of circumstances.

As for me, I often have a hard time taking my own advice, but even if it's just an inward celebration or some small thing I do by myself that seems ordinary to the outside world, celebrating my fifth birthday is exactly what I intend to do. And I'll keep celebrating every year from now on, with Derek and all the others out there who didn't share my outcome —or simply haven't finished the battle yet — right there in the forefront of my mind and in my prayers in the process.