Victim of Cancer

“You have cancer” Those three words change a day, a week, a life and history. Its funny actually, when you first hear these damned words, its like getting a scrap on your knee, does not hurt right away, but once it sinks in a few minutes later, its so painful. I remember these cursed words like I remember hitting baseballs in little league and running around the neighborhood with my friends buying ice cream from the ice cream man or your first kiss from that girl that you never thought it would happen with. These ominous words are only a start on the roller coaster of hell called life after cancer.

After the doctor sat my mom, brother and myself down in front of my dad dressed in that dreadful hospital dress and wearing a smirk that shone form behind his bushy mustache that caused a quick sigh of relief to wash over me. I was naïve, or just plain dumb to think that just because my dad wore a smirk on his sun tanned 5 O clock shadowed face, things were going to be OK. I was wrong. Dead wrong. My father who was just 49 years old had been diagnosed with stage five stomach cancer. My father, who was training at the gym to be in a body building competition of men over 50. My father, a man who never drank or smoked his whole life. My father, a man I never have seen be sick. My father a man that I had never seen cry or let life get him down. My father, my father was diagnosed with a cancer that gave him six months to live.

I don’t even know how I fought back my tears in my eyes, probably because I wanted to be strong just like my dad, if he would not cry, than I would not cry. I never cried in front of my dad, it would make him feel so insecure and inadequate, he would think that he was not the same man he was. That would be completely wrong. In fact, with him battling stage five stomach cancer, I look up to him and think

Damn, I only wish I could have half the drive my father has when if I ever get sick, this man never slows down