Mackenzie's Story

A Story by sjmblue2

This is a true story about the events in my friend Mack's life. Her dad has been living with cancer and I am writing this in honor of him and their family since i love them all so much.

Today I got the news I was dreading about getting for a year now. In fact, it’s the kind of new that everyone everywhere should always dread hearing. It’s enough hardship to hear that your great aunt Millie is dying and it’s terribly hard to imagine what life would be like without great grandpa Tim but somehow these deaths are always less tragic. Now let’s bring it down to you, your actual family, the people that you see day in and day out, the only group you can trust with every feeling, every secret, everything you could ever imagine. Think about how hard it would be if you found out that the very rock of your household was a ticking time bomb with only 6 months left to live. Imagine if it was your dad.

My dad has been living with cancer for over a year and he’s been handling it pretty well. He tries to be happy and in good spirits to relieve some of the tension between my mom, my sister and I. See when someone close to you is sick, you start bottling up your feelings of hopelessness and at some point those feelings exploded at the ones who care for you most. Everyone feels bad about fighting with one another because we know that it bothers my dad so everything is always really tense. Despite trying to keep his personality hopeful, his body never showed any signs of getting better. The weight was melting off of him pounds at a time no matter what the doctors did to help it. His skin continued to get paler as the months went by. The doctors kept saying that the chemo would help him, that we would start seeing improvements after he had been on it for a while. My dad tried to hide how bad chemo made him feel. He would tell my mom that he felt great, that he was going to get better in no time. However, when everyone was asleep I would wake up to the sounds of him vomiting and crying prayers in the bathroom. I knew nothing was going to save my dad deep in my heart but I still prayed for a miracle every night.

Having a dad with cancer not only puts pressure on your home life but it also affects your social life. My friends never understood why I sunk into depression and couldn’t laugh like normal. I used to be a really joyful person; I had everything I could ever want. I had my friends who all supported me, my boyfriend who loved me, and my parents all in perfect health. The third one got taken away and all the sudden the pyramid of perfectness started to crumble. Since I bottled up my stress at home I took it out on my friends over the littlest things. If they said a joke that didn’t sit the right way with me, if they said I looked tired or too stressed I would snap at them. Slowly one by one they stopped talking to me. They stopped caring about the girl whose dad had cancer. In fact, most of the left me the moment that I told them like their dads were going to get cancer just from being friends with me. The others dwindled off when they got tired of my random burst of sadness and lack of wanting to go out. Actually I can really only say that I have one friend now and her name is Sarah. Sarah has a special talent of taking someone’s burdens and making them her own. When I told her about my dad she skipped all her plans for the rest of that day and hung out with me. She always knows just the right things to say when I am slipping into the cocoon of sadness I almost always reside in. And she knows the moments when I do need to cry and she hugs me until I am done. Sarah is the best friend I have ever had.

I know everyone wonders what it is like to have a family member with a terminal illness and let me describe it to you. It is like walking on thin glass over a cavern of flaming rocks. Each and every piece of bad news cracks the glass more and more and every person that turns away from you is a 100 mile an hour wind trying to knock you off. The more bad news that comes the more cracks there are and the more people that leave the more constant the wind is until you either fall or the glass cracks into pieces beneath you. It is like a raging storm within you. Should you go out tonight or should you spend time with your dad. Should you still laugh and enjoy life while someone so dear to you is losing it day by day. Should you still have hope for a miracle only for it to be smashed into pieces when you find out he got worse. Should you even try to go on living or should you sink back into the darkest corner of your mind and stay there until you can no longer see the real world and feel the real pain. That’s what it is like to live with a dad that has cancer. It is choices always and you are afraid if you make the wrong one that you will regret it for the rest of your life.