C is for Cancer

 (On a much less light-hearted note...)

For six letters, the word carries so much weight.

 

At its easiest, its a small skin change on your forehead or your nose or your cheek from too much time spent with sunburn that can be frozen off or sliced off and forgotten.

At its difficult, its the shocking, horrifying word spoken by a doctor, that shuts down your brain and forces the world to close in around you, the rift opening where there was none before. That terrible moment of diagnosis when you find that word suddenly attached to you or to a loved one. A word, a label, that will never come off, even if it is lucky enough to have the word “survivor” tacked after it.

At its hardest, its all the long wound that comes after that first shock. Its the waiting, and the treatments, and the battles you watch them fight when all you wish is that it could be taken away. Its the tear of grief after grief. The grief that widens into a canyon at the heart of you in the aftermath. A canyon that you hope will become a scar, one day. A canyon or a scar that you will carry forward with you every day for the rest of your life.