Targeted

I’ve wanted to write this down for quite some time…

Why Me? The question is so stereotypical for a victim that it almost becomes rhetorical. As a cancer victim I have obviously asked myself the question over and over again without even expecting a response. But I am still curious. Why do such bad things happen to good people? How many times do we read about some psychopathic child-molesting serial killer dying a slowly painful death of cancer?

I was watching a documentary the other night on last year’s Boxing Day Tsunami which included discussions with survivors. Survivors are pretty stereotypical just like victims. Be it the Holocaust, September 11th or the Tsunami the survivors question is “Why not me?” or “Why did I survive and these others die?”. They too will never have an answer and tend to live with a lot of guilt in the mean time. I personally have always thought of myself as a survivor and have survived quite a lot of ups and downs in my life. I have never (yet?) felt guilty about surviving… I’ve always felt happy to be alive and generally a bit proud and pleased with myself.

Lately I feel that not only did I do something seriously wrong (bad karma, bad vibes or just bad attitude) that I am being paid back for but that some entity has literally made choices about this disease specifically for me. It can’t be entirely coincidence that out of all the fatal diseases out there, and unfortunately we do not lack choices, this particular blend of cancer affects all of the specific aspects of life which are dear to me.

I am a very sensual person. I was raised with an emphasis on the 6 senses (yes… 6). The basic 5 (taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight) have all been the most important aspects of my life. By this I mean that the senses have been more important to me than the intellect. In my personal life taste has become probably the most enjoyable and pleasurable. One of the major reasons I chose to live where I live is that we eat for pleasure not purely for biological needs. I love the various tastes of foods and wines. That is where my artistic sides lie. It can not be entirely coincidental that the direct effect of this particular flavour of this disease affects specifically my favourites: ALL wine tastes awful, cheese tastes like chalk, patés sting, fresh bread hurts to chew and the list goes on. All of the foods and tastes I love in life have been taken away from me. I don’t even know for certain that my taste buds will ever come back to the level I had raised them to.

And now I can’t speak. Now anyone who knows me, even those who only know me by reputation, knows that I love to talk and always have. I worked on my voice, my pronunciation and my accent throughout most of my childhood. I’ve always been both proud of and pleased with my voice. However I also have just always enjoyed the simple pleasure of conversation. Now conversation is actually painful. It’s not that my voice is weak and faint, which it is, but rather that is actually physically painful to try and speak. I can only hope that my voice will one day come back to where it was before all this started.

It still seems to me as though all of the specific effects of this illness have been directed at my specific pleasures in life. My question therefore no longer is “Why Me?” but rather “What did I do? … and to who?” If someone would let me know I would apologise, I would repent and I would do whatever it took to rectify the situation. I would feel so much more active rather than submitting to the disease and “getting through it”. I’ve screwed up before in my life, more times than I’d like to admit, and I thought I’ve always patched up whatever I messed up and sometimes even improved the situation in the end. But obviously I’ve missed out on something.

Paranoid? Me? Who said that???