Shut Up!

At the risk of being unpopular, sounding like an ungrateful person, this is something that is really starting to piss me off. I need to talk about it and just put it out there. I do not wish to offend any person and I am not dismissive of the awful times people go through with losing someone so close to them through cancer. My heart and love goes out to everyone who has been touched by this awful disease.

Having said that, I am still strong on my opinion of asking to please, consider your topic before discussing it.

I am a pretty easy going person. I don’t care what a persons view is on religion or politics, I really don’t care where you live or who you live with, black, white, gay, straight, man or woman, dog or cat……. I can pretty much talk to you about anything without getting offended or feeling out of place. And yes, I will even talk to dogs and cats.

Talking about anything and everything is pretty interesting to me because I love hearing about things that I don’t know about. Oh, unless it is about retaining walls and storm water flow. Those topics generally bore the shit out of me.

Recently, I finally found another topic that many people want to tell me about that I have no interest in talking about.

Death from Cancer.

Now, it seems, so many people want to tell me about a family member, friend or someone who died from cancer.

Shut. Up.

Do I look like I want to hear your story? No, I don’t want to hear your story. Although I am terribly sorry you have had to go through such a loss, I wonder why you think I want to hear about it.

Sometimes I really feel like saying, oohh, do you have another story just like that to tell me because that one made me feel marvelous! Please please tell me another story about someone else who had breast cancer or another type of cancer and died.

You are telling me about someone who had the same or similar illness as myself and then letting me know (as if I don’t think about it a hundred times a day already) that it kills people.

Shut. Up.

I know people die from cancer. We all know people die from it. What we cancer survivors do not want to hear about is how it can kill them. Cancer survivors are not free of cancer. We have fought for our lives but it doesn’t mean we wont have to do it again. We hope we never have to fight like we did for our lives but most of us have it in the back of our minds. Is the cancer still in our bodies?

You do not tell a new mother about the awful death of a baby you know about.

You do not tell a parent sitting by their sons hospital bed following a car accident that you know three people who have died in car accidents this year.

You. Shut. Up.

Why do people feel so comfortable talking to a cancer survivor about the death of other people from the same horrible disease?

Do they think we feel ‘lucky’ to have had cancer and still be standing here today?

It is not up to you to ‘make us feel better’ with these stories.

Please, stop talking to us about deaths caused by cancer. It is not a conversation I wish to be a part off. That may change at some stage but today, no, I do not want to hear it.

Shut. Up.