In 2019 at the age of forty-two I was diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer. Let's be clear when you are diagnosed with cancer everyone is going to expect  you to fight it. They'lll lie about how horrific the treatment is. They'll tell you that if you wanted to you could play full-contact sports after your treatment is over. Even if that isn't your thing is certainly suggets your life will be normal on the other side of treatment. You're loved ones will look at you expectedly and before you know it you'll be guilted into a treatment plan because it makes everyone else feel comfortable. No one wants to think about how maybe letting a loved one go is the right thing to do. It's too exestianl, too "slippery of a slope."

The first thing they did was tell me I would need a permanent colostomy. Which is where you deficate out of a hole in your stomach and into a bag. They told me eventually this would seem normal and become and every day routine. After that they they started a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.

The first thing I noticed was that the chemo began to make anything I ate taste as if i were biting into an aluminum can. Nothing tasted good, then the upset stomach hit and they gave me medication for it. Eventually the radiation caused by colon to burn and every bowel movement was agony where I screamed. They gave me hydrocodone but they may as well have been Pez. They didn't touch the pain.

Finally when they said I had, had enough chemo and radiation to shrink the cancer they set up and appointment with a surgeon to cut the cancer out and give me that colostomy. The surgery was supposed to take three hours. Things went wrong and I was under for eight. When I finally came to I noticed my eye glass prescription had changed. I needed new glasses. The only thing I could find on this was the possiblity of a stoke during surgery. The surgery was supposed to be aided by a robot but that failed and they cut a gash in my side to pull the cancer out. The nurses would have to roll me over in bed and I would scream in pain each time. Then there was an issue with my insurance and they kicked me out the door. I could barely get out of bed. I needed help using the bathroom.

I got the insurance straightened out and a few days later I went to the ER in intense pain. They put me back in the hospital for twenty-four hours but no one did anything. If anything they seemed annoyed that I had come back. When they released me they made me walk to the door which was three hall ways and an elevator ride away. I barely made it to the front without passing out.

I came back home, I couldn't get out of the recliner and I needed help getting up for anything. Then late one night after trying to reach the bathroom on my own I passed out on the way back to the living room and was rushed to the ER. I spent the next five hours unable to breathe due to a blood clot in my lungs and before it was over I'm told my face was purple. They cut a hole in my neck, put a tube down my throat and into my lungs and sprayed the clot with blood thinners. I spent a week in the ICU and another week in a regular room before being discharged.

In the months that followed I lost all my teeth because chemo makes excelerates tooth decay and I couldn't afford a dentist. I spent three of those months unable to get out of the recliner in the living room. I didn't drive again for nearly four months. I ended up with diabetes too. I probably would have gotten it eventuallly but chemo and radiation speed up your bodies aging process and so it hit me sooner. Then I needed more surgery to correct a hernia around my stoma. Thankfully that went okay. A few months ago an endoscopy turned up a stomach ulcer. The hits just keep on coming.

Today I am legally disabled. I'm on a fixed income and wonder how long it will be before I am priced out of my crime ridden apartment complex because the rent keeps increasing but my SSDI does not. I'm on a million different medications for a million different things, my hands crack, bleed and ulcerate in the winter, I'm tired all the time. I feel like I'm seventy and I haven't hit fifty yet. My life revolves around the bag that hangs off of my stomach. Don't gain too much weight because I could end up in the hospital if I do, make sure it's emptied ten time a day, sometimes wake up in a pool of my own crap because the appliance failed while I was in bed.

In a few weeks I have one last CT scan to make sure the cancer has not returned. Every scan I have I pray that it has. Cancer pain is nothing compared to my life as it is. If the cancer has not come back then I'm offically "out of the woods" and I have to pretend to celebrate with people so they feel comfortable while I hold back the tears that come with the thought another twenty or thirty years on this earth. 

Sometimes it's better to let someone die. Sometimes the missery is unbarable. Ask most people why they put their pet to sleep and they'll say "Because they were suffering" but we don't do that for humans. Humans have to suffer so that we don't make others uncomfortable with the thought that maybe, just maybe it's more humane to let our loved ones go than to hang on to them and demand that they stay.