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Me at my second day of chemo in July
Cancer seems to come bearing gifts.
Some of them you wish you could return to sender, true.
I could have done without
- bone pain,
- lost friendships,
- the cancer itself and its stupid smug face.
(Gotta get that anger out. Dies faster that way.)
People who have been on this journey have also told me to expect it to change my life in a positive way. I wish I had believed them sooner.
Because it showed me, through the actions of people around me that I am loved and supported.
Theoretically you know that you’re loved.
People say so.
Some even take actions to show it even when life is just okay, or congratulate you when it’s grand.
But you see who truly loves you by their actions when you’re down and out.
I bring this up partly to procrastinate, because I’m about to do something that’s really hard for me.
It’s also partly that through learning that there is support for me that I’ve gathered the courage to do something I’d hoped I wouldn’t be necessary.
I need to ask you for a favor
In the interest of not wasting your time, I’m going to make a list of the things I need help with, then circle back around to explain why this is so hard for me, and why I did it anyway, despite that.
I need help with:
- spreading the word about this fundraiser my friends put together
- donations to the fundraiser – no amount is too small
- people to join my thunderclap about the fundraiser
- a volunteer to help me ask my colleagues and friends for help one on one (just comment and we’ll email you.)
Why do I need help?
I made this with the Prism app. Isn’t it neat?
I can currently only work part time, and cancer is an expensive disease to have. This was okay at first – I wasn’t what you would call poor in recent years.
However, the hours I can work have slipped with each month of chemo, and when this round is over, another will begin this fall for the mass in my lung that has barely responded to the CLL treatment.
My mother, a retired nurse, has gone back to work to help. That makes me eternally grateful but also breaks my heart every day.
I dragged my feet about this fundraiser, thinking I could do just a little more work. But I can’t.
Now I’m constantly paying bills late, and coming up short when I need things I didn’t require before the Lymphoma came along.
I can’t reach everyone I need to reach who is in a position to help by myself. And for this fundraiser to work out, I really need for each as much of the communities I belong to as I can.
And that’s why I need you. It’s truly a last resort to ask.
I’ll take “Things that are emotionally &
physically hard for $100, Alex.”
I’m holding back tears as I write this. It’s crazy how cancer can change your idea of yourself, your identity.
See, in my mind, I’m the person who helps people, not the person who needs help. I was the primary breadwinner, in a household of three adults and four kids under 10.
Having to ask for help makes me feel like I’ve failed somehow.
It sounds a little ridiculous out loud, but it does make me wonder why I always think everyone else is worthy of help and assistance, but when it’s time to help myself, I struggle to simply ask.
It’s not my first time asking for help from communities I belong to- but it IS the first time I’ve had nothing of my own to offer in return besides my continued service.
It’s also physically hard. Between the fatigue, my lack of stamina, bone pain and previous health issues, I spend most hours in bed unable to do more than the occasional tweet, flip or share.
Writing a 1200 word article used to take two hours with graphics.
Now it takes three weeks.
So when I say this is hard for me, I really mean, almost impossible.
How you can help me
I know not everyone can spare even $5 to help me out.
But I’ve noticed that a lot of the people who could really help have audiences that overlap the communities I belong to, which is handy.
The more people you can reach on my behalf, the fewer bigwigs I will have to contact one on one.
That really helps a lot- together we can reach more people who know me than I can alone, and faster.
So please, take one of these actions on my behalf, it will help so much. If you can, it would help if you could do so more than once.
It doesn’t have to be the same action each time, of course. But here are some suggestions:
- Share one of my blog posts or Facebook posts about the fundraiser (each is linked to the fundraiser) by text or in social media
- Share the link to the fundraiser – especially on Twitter or Facebook
- Join my Thunderclap – it goes out September 1st if I can get 100 people.
- Write your own blog post about the fundraiser, directing people here or to the fundraiser
- Let me guest post on your site – I can re-post one of my blog posts on your site, or have my volunteer editors help me rewrite one or create a new one for you
- Donate. We need to raise $119 a day to reach the goal in time and we’re behind.
- Write to info@giveforward.com if you ever have any problem with the site. There have been glitches and it seems to help if more than one person reports errors.
Thank you
Whatever you’re able to do, and however you’ve helped up until this point, no matter how small you think your gesture was, I guarantee you it means or meant the world to me.
After all, you could have done nothing. People do it all the time.
You could have not read this until the end (I know I’m long winded but this was also twice as long before editing, so I’m trying!)
You could have not commented, not liked, not shared, not bothered.
I appreciate your help, your support, your love. So thank you.
This is beautiful, and elegant, and thank you for trusting us enough to ask! Here for you, as you know!
Xo,
Katny
Oh Kathy. It’s because of you that this happened. If I’d waited until I thought it would help, and I had the energy, that page would not be up.
Trusting all of you (especially the fundraising team) was not the struggle. It truly is an inner self-worth conversation in the end, buried underneath the doubt anyone would care enough to donate, the fear that it would change how others view you, the potential embarrassment if nothing happened, what some people might think of this.
All of that, in the end, boils down to that voice inside saying “why would you think enough people care about you that much, that they could raise that much money for you in that amount of time? Just who do you think you are?”
Thanks for helping me shut that cranky witch up so the real me can breathe! Thank you for being the organizing force. Thank you for being a friend I could count on repeatedly when my back was against the wall.
I am aware of how expensive such things are. It is sad, and even sadder that our “new” national health plan does not seem to help in such matters. The insurance is available for everybody, but is prohibitively expensive, has terribly high deductibles, and then only covers a small portion of the cost. Makes no sense. I do have to ask – how does getting cancer cause you to lose friends? That was a curious item in your post and viscerally makes me really MAD! They were, no doubt, not true friends at all.
Hi Tom! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me.
Well, first, the national health plan literally saved my life. Before that it saved me about $3600 a month versus what I paid in cash for half the care. It’s by no means perfect. But I’m alive because it exists and has left me needing $7500 instead of $75,000.
The more difficult question of how I lost friends is harder to answer. It was in multiple ways. One friend I lost because I rejected his cure for cancer, which would of course require me to buy hundreds of dollars worth of products from the MLM he was distributing for.
My position that this is my body, and that I was going to do a blended approach to my treatment of previously tested remedies from Western and Eastern medicine infuriated him. Instead of debating me with facts and studies, as I did with my doctors, he just kind of called me names & tried to make me feel bad about choosing how I would save my own life.
But in that case, it was more of a discovery that he wasn’t my friend. Who puts their hurt feelings or lost profits above the value of your life.
I lost another friend because I couldn’t be all about her all the time. That’s a biased view of course. But it seemed from my end that if I had a need, it wasn’t met. She was a fun party/hang out friend whenever I was north of Baltimore. But I think maybe our bond just wasn’t reciprocal. Again, maybe just not meant to be.
Then there are people who just don’t respond to me anymore. I don’t know why. They went silent when I told them, and no matter how much I reach out to them, they don’t respond. I don’t know if I’m calling those friends lost or absent. Some people can’t deal with the idea of cancer or losing you to it.
I had to let go of a relationship because I knew I needed a person in a more supportive role. That was more change than loss, and my decision. He’s been superlative as a friend but it’s still hard.
I could go on and on. Some of this is muddied up in how people think I should act or behave. That I’m too cheerful, not skinny and sickly, didn’t lose my hair. I’m not speculating, this is based on actual things people have said to me.
I’m choosing to focus on the people who have been here, who are here, who do SO much for me, then actually apologize for not doing more.
So don’t be infuriated on my behalf, though my heart thanks you for such compassion. Everything is as it should be- my friendships are like a gently groomed garden now, weeds gone, some roots temporarily buried, all flowers blossoming.