Cancer

Max and I have start re-watching “Breaking Bad.” We are on the first season where Walter has cancer and is desperate to try to find a way to pay for treatment and also leave his family financially secure if he dies. As we watched scenes of Walter in chemo and radiation clinics, getting his doses of horrible treatments to fight the cancer, I started to have strange fantasies like, why can’t this be me?

I started wondering why people who have families and children have to suffer through radiation and chemo and someone like me, who really has nothing to live for, and has very good health insurance, is healthy. I don’t wish to have cancer, but I feel like finding a source of all the pain inside me would be such a huge relief. An oncologist or radiologist could show me a scan or xray and say “Look at this dark area. That is where the mass/tumor/bad cells are. We have to eradicate them, and we will use radiation, chemo, gamma knife surgery, and frozen fantods.”

I would be very, very sick as a result of all this treatment of “the dark area,” vomiting a lot and having my hair fall out and the usual reactions to cancer treatment. In some fantasies, I don’t make it, and I can be reunited with Sarah. In other fantasies, I do pull through after a lot of treatment, my body wracked and wretchedly thin, and my appearance forever scarred, but purged of this horribleness.

Yes, this is a pretty sick and sinister fantasy, and I also want to apologize to anyone who actually has cancer, or their relatives. My dad had to have radiation for prostate cancer, and my sister-in-law many years ago had Hodgkins (or was it non-Hodgkins?) disease. So my somatic fantasies make me feel pretty guilty and twisted. Of course, people don’t get cancer because they are bad people who have done bad things.

I just would like to find a way to be clean again somehow, to feel like I could serve my jail time or pay my pennance or have my badness removed. When I express this feeling, the response is always “You have nothing to feel guilty about! You were such a good mother!” But I don’t feel like a good mother. I feel like a mother to a child who died in the night when I wasn’t there.