I have been pummelled lately with the adage that when you have cancer, your whole family does to and everyone that cares about you. At first I was like NO WAY! and THAT’S RIDICULOUS! No one else has tumors all over their body! No one else is getting poison shoved into their veins. C’MON! And then, I took a minute and got over myself and realized that that is not what that statement means. It doesn’t mean that everybody else is going through all the physical aspects of the cancer. It means that they are on their own emotional journey because the cancer is affecting someone they care about and they feel kind of helpless about it. They are having their own whirlwind of thoughts and feelings all the time as well. They have sorrow and sadness and anger all at the same time too. They need counselling too. The anger to me is actually sadder than the plain old sadness. I notice with my own family that I get caught in the crossfire of all of those feeling more than I care to. It is strange though, because, even though I get a lot of anger directed toward me, it doesn’t mean that they are actually angry at me. The way they describe it is that they are angry about what is happening to me and they don’t know how to express it. Well, combine that type of misdirected miscommunication with a dose of my current oversensitivity( and me being off prozac to boot) and we have a real mess on our hands at times. Suffice it to say, we are keeping the therapy offices busy right now and it still doesn’t always work out the best. It is a work in progress to be sure. Having said that, now that I have a better understanding of what that statement means, I can make better attempts at not taking their emotions personally. So maybe, if they can try a little harder not to misdirect and I can try a little harder to understand that they are going through stuff too, we can do a little better together.