Choroidal Melanoma

I wrote the following essay in 2007, eleven months after being diagnosed with choroidal melanoma in 2006, on my birthday, no less. It was such an emotional upheaval, it was helpful and healing to put my thoughts and emotions down on paper. I keep this as a reminder than life is precious and to never take anything or anyone for granted.

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My Walk With Cancer

Being told you have cancer is a life-altering experience.  Until that moment, perhaps your closest brush with this dread disease is to have sat by the bedside of a loved one who was dying of it and watch helplessly as the life miserably and inexorably ebbed away from them.  If you've never had that experience, perhaps to you, cancer is just a terrible thing that happens to "other people" and you really can't empathize or comprehend the depths of despair that envelop one who has been dealt this blow.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Ryalls.  You have a lesion in your left eye." 

 ...Lesion...  What do you mean, lesion?  ...Do you mean to tell me I have cancer?!?
  

"Yes."

The reality didn't even hit me until after I walked out of the office and got into my car.  Then it exploded into my brain:  

"Oh, my God, I have cancer!  In my eye!  How bad is it?  What is next?  ...Oh, my dear God, please help me!"   

It was like someone just slugged me across the face with something very big and very hard, like say...a brick wall.

I didn't learn much that day at the doctor's office; didn't even know what questions to ask.  So I turned to the internet. Mistake!!  If you are told you have cancer of any kind, DO NOT turn to the internet.  Listen to your doctors.  

According to several articles on the internet, with the type of cancer I have, choroidal melanoma, I'd live anywhere from two to five years. Five years max. If I was lucky.

We all have a deep-seated, ingrained fear of cancer due to its history of lingering, tortuous, wasting death.  Fortunately today, there are so many advances in the study and treatment of the hundreds of known cancers, survival is becoming more common and hope more prevalent. 

Even so, for many, to be diagnosed with the awful C-word, is to find one's self emotionally teetering on the brink of a deep precipice, staring wide-eyed into the gaping jaws of death.  Your life becomes a living nightmare; to sleep is temporary escape, only to find when you wake, that you enter the nightmare once again.   You cry.  You keep crying. Even when you can't produce any more tears, you still cry.  And you find a dirty, grey veil drawn over your every waking hour.

"Oh, yeah, that's right, I remember now... I'm going to die."

Your brain becomes numb from the unrelenting fear and you cannot rid yourself of the sensation of an icy, cold fist clutching your heart.  You walk through each day as in a trance, as though you are staring down a long tunnel and the real world exists only outside that tunnel.  You go to bed at night and lie staring into the black dark and wonder how long you will live. 

"Will I make it 3 more years?  Two?  Why, I'd only be 56 years old!  I'm too young!"

or

"I'm not ready!  My family still needs me.  I don't want to leave them!" 

or

"How did this happen?  Why?  I'm finally in a happy marriage that I've waited all my life for!  Why is it being taken from me now?!"  and on and on.

You become so exhausted and weary from the constant fear, that life's normal ups and downs don't raise a hair on your head any longer.  You wonder why anything that was of any significance to you before, ever mattered at all.  

While out shopping, a common weekend pastime for me, I found myself picking up merchandise--a lipstick, a new shirt--and putting them back thinking, "What's the point?  Why waste the money on a dead person?" Dead Man Walking; that's how I thought of myself.

"What are my chances of this coming back, Dr.?" 

"You have a 20% chance that it will return in the next five years."  

The information saddens me considerably. But, conversely, I have an 80% chance of a complete cure.  Pretty darn good odds, eh? 

Here's the deal. It matters not whether you have a cancer diagnosis or heart problems or whatever:  

You can succumb to the terror and grief 

or

 You can choose to live. 

Eventually, the fear subsides to a manageable degree.  You can choose to fight the insidious enemy within.  You can gain some control.  You can educate yourself about the disease and fight it.  You can feed yourself nutritious food and avoid the poisons that nourish the disease.  You may or may not win in the end, but you'll have "fought the good fight" and chosen life for the time that remains. 

To choose life over death in this way is supremely empowering.  You appreciate more fully every single day, rain or shine, poverty or riches, good, bad or indifferent--it doesn't matter!  It's a brand new day and you are alive in it!  

You can be thrilled at the sound of a bird twittering outside your window, a rose blooming in the yard, the perfect blue of the sky, the beauty of your children's faces...the glow of love you see in your husband's eyes.

The trials and tribulations of the everyday world pale, absolutely pale in comparison to these.  

Once again, you can appreciate all these things in the simple purity that God intended.  And finally...you realize that you've been given a supremely priceless gift: How to truly embrace life and all it offers.

Leslie Ryalls

9/09/07