The Dance

By Judy T. Lloyd

Today is December 25th,2009 and it is my twentieth year of dealing with cancer. What a dance this has been. From dancing around the diagnosis to dancing during the walk for life, it is a dance that I would not have missed.

Garth Brooks wrote the song The Dance and it became a theme song for myself and others who grasped the meaning of that song.


Had I Known

By Judy T. Lloyd

Had I known that I would do the dance.
The one with cancer would I still take the chance?
I believe that it was my destiny that it be so.
I would dance just as the flakes dance in the snow.

Had I known other loved ones would not have been invited.
Although it would mean they would be slighted.
Because this is a dance that only has one partner.
Cancer is an enemy in which you can not barter.

Had I known that insurance companies were only there to make money.
I would have danced differently but I would have danced lonely.
That too was not the way the caller called the dance.

Had I known that I would be the one to write the story.
Would I have skipped the pain and only sought glory?
I do not know why it had to be me but I also know why not me?
Because dancing means you live so that others can be cancer free.

When we look at the pictures on the wall of friends and family what do we see? Do we see the stories of their cancers and if so would we encourage them first to dance with the diagnosis?

I can say this that I went a little crazy when I first heard the news "you have cancer." No way was I going to dance around with this diagnosis, I did not believe the doctor. He seemed to be so cold hearted and it was not my style to call someone up on the phone and tell them this type of news. I also did not want to dance the dance that the cancer society gave me. I felt that I was not a number for them to play with. I was a human being with a heartbeat and could breathe.

I told my doctor that he was quoting from script and I hated that in any form. Whether it is a preacher doing a sermon to insurance agents reading a prep line to sell insurance. Scripted conversation is not a conversation at all. It is the doctor talking at you and not to you. There are some many dances that you do when you have cancer.

Little Dancers

By Judy T. Lloyd

Little dancing Pac Men in my bloodstream.
Tearing at my intestines while I scream.
Dance while you can little Dancers.
Radiation will cure me of my cancers.

Little tiny dancers running around and around.
Put that mean old cancer right into the ground.
Pac Men are going down the drain.
While Scrubing Bubbles clear my brain.

Little Dancers go away.
I will not dance with you another day.
I will live to dance another way.
Cancer is not here to stay.

You might say that filling out insurance forms and requesting permission from a primary physcian is easy. It is nothing more but another form of dance. Only this is a dance that you do just as if someone had a gun and are firing bullets at your feet. You are damned if you do and damned if you do not have insurance.
If you have insurance then you can sure that every test in the book, including those that are not necessary are preformed. After a diagnsois of cancer in my kidney was given to an opposing attorney in a workman's compensation case. I was queried when she asked.
"How do you know it was cancer if they did not do an biopsy?" I do not know if she was helping me or not.
"The markers in my bloodstream indicated that I had cancer."
She found that she could not get me to dance the way she thought that I should. I would have liked to have proven a connection between stress and cancer but my lawyer thought it best to get the case resolved. This finally happened but not with out having to fill out a lot of dance cards with doctors,lawyers,and hospitals. If they told me to jump, I did but never asked how high. If they told me that I had to do this test, I would grumble but did many of them even when I was in a great deal of pain.

Dancing In Line

By Judy T. Lloyd

So here we are with our bare butts and breasts.
We would like you to just give it a rest.
Alas but cancer puts a crimp in line dancing.
See the man who is doing the prancing?

He is not practicing to be a reindeer.
He hurts from his head to his rear.
As for me I can call this dancing.
When I walk like a crab who is not romancing.

Oh what a pity you think.
Yes that is my butt that stinks.
With all of the radiation,
I have put down feces from the preparation.

Men can tell you this is true.
I see you are going to laugh until you turn blue.
Thomas Jefferson was wrong you see.
All men are not created equal when they can hardly pee.

As for me when I go to pee.
Old baldy is what I see.
Your mind is in a blur.
My toliet paper is covered with fur.

The absolute worst thing about having chemotherapy or radiation crap is that you can not kill some fat woman who is holding up the bathroom. You have not lived until someone comes up and asks where you lost your hair. Then you show them why it is called a fur burger. Eventually though chemotherapy removes hair from eyebrows,the public area,your head and everywhere else that has hair follicles.
It is imperative that you have a sense of humor or cancer will weigh you down. As it is I joined a Cancer Support Group and I was put on Paxil. The paxil calmed the nerves down and allowed me to be able to think. It also did a lot when controlling the pain.

So you do the dance of painkillers and trying to rate your pain. That works sometimes and others you just want to crawl in bed and cover your head. If you were to ask a friend of mine she would tell you that I give out permission slips. They allow the patient to cover their heads and say.
"Go away, don't even touch me." Vandal used the permission slip when she had her hysterectomy in 2005. I have also given other patients the same permission. Absolutely the most blessed soul that came across my path was Alva Penn. Alva was a slender sixtish senior who had bone cancer. Her tumor was hideous and I wondered how this beautiful lady could tolerate the pain. She taught me how to make a slushee using fruit. I knew she was chewing on hashish but I made a vow that was not to be revealed. When you see a tumor that causes the leg to swell and break open from the ravenous tumor, you do not take their relief away. Had I been one inclined to give anyone more morphine it would have been her. But her belief was that when the creator was ready for her,she would go.
It was that year that I became determined to bring a Relay For Life event to our county. I had seen enough, cried enough and gone through so much with so many that to not do a Relay was a cardinal sin to me.

Relay For Life

By Judy T. Lloyd

Run for your life because it is your only one.
Encourage others to run with you.
Learn that you are not a victim.
Always keep your mind active.
You have the strength to survive.

Forever will you remember the lights.
Onocology does not say you will die.
Run as if others depend on you.

Life is to be lived even when you have cancer.
Invest by believing,hoping,surviving the race.
Friends you meet will stay with you always.
Eventually there will be a cure so run.

We set a goal of raising $15,000.00 this year, we nearly tripled that in 2009. Once people saw how this relay worked they were biting at the bit to participate again. The cover picture is of me and Theresa Arnold sitting at the registration table. Behind us is Amy Nunally who raised the most funds during,before and after the Relay. We also celebrated the twenty-fifth year of Relay. I am the one in the purple shirt. You do not have to have cancer to run in this race, you just have to have integrity to see to it that no one else becomes a survivor or honoree. I do not use for valid reasons the term victims nor do I allow anyone to make myself or a friend a statistic. That is the twist of dancing with cancer.

The Cancer Twist

By Judy T. Lloyd

You say come on baby let's do the cancer twist.
Sorry but I am not your baby.
Though you twist me about with your statistics.
Do statistics bleed or do they have a brain.
Yet when I am being x-rayed you twist me all about.
I believe there is not a move or twist that my body has not seen.
Excuse me but do you have chemo brain?
It is hard to twist the caps off the bottle for pain.
Oops there goes the twist in the tourniquet seems the vampire is going to strike again.
Must you make so much noise raising my bed,
I thought you had a button and not a lever.
I believe the nurses dropped every chart in the house, if the doctor slipped now that would be a twist of fate.
I yell out in pain when the staples twist on my surgical site.
These are but a few twists you want me to make.
Sorry but I do not believe it is a date.

I do not believe in pretending that everything is alright. Most of the time it is not and most of the time the friends should take a back seat and just let the patient talk. One of the most irratating things to a cancer patient is for somebody to be whispering in there room. Family members mean well but then they say to the medical staff to not tell grandma she has cancer. Frankly what do they think that we can not read or know what the word Onocology means?

I met probable more cancer patients than most, I have also been a certified nursing assistant and I know how people feel. Sure cancer hits you like an iceberg. I will always say that having cancer is like having winter all year. So when asked by the patient, tell them the truth. There are tactful ways to do this. My mother-in-law asked me if she was going to die. You see a child she had babysat for was grown and wanted to do something for her. She brought her minister in to lay hands on Anna May. Anna May said she felt a warmth but she was not cured. Now this causes great debate, as I have seen people beat cancer and did so because of their great faith. I would not hesitate to pray for a person nor would I keep them from spiritual advisers. But when the inevitable sits in and the person realizes that a miracle did not occur they can be devastated. Anna May was and it was not long before she had to enter a nursing home.

Am I Going To Die?

By Judy T. Lloyd

"Am I going to die?" she asked.
"Yes you are but not today." I answered.
"When will I die then."
"You will not die until you are supposed to.
That may be a cop out but it really is not."
"Why not?" I reached down and took off her shoe.
"Anna May there is no expiration date on your foot." This seemed to console her and she went back to sleep.
When it came time, she did not ask for she was in a coma.
We sang to her and held her hand while the angels came.
We should all be so lucky.

In the dance of death for cancer patients the person who is with them makes the difference. Death as in my mother-in-law's case was not ugly. She was at peace after having heard her youngest son's voice over the phone. Her oldest son and I held her hands. We sang Jesus Loves Me and other tunes that she knew. We also told her to take the hand of Jesus and go home. There were a few rebound breathes and she let go. It seemed very cold on the drive home but it was August 5th,1995. A few months later I dealt with the death of her sister-in-law in the same manner. What a cold day in December that was. Gladys gave up after Anna May died she had a stroke. But the x-rays of her stomach showed that she too had cancer. It was just not revealed to her family. The doctor trusted me enough because of the fact the family had so much else to deal with. Within months we lost seven members of our co-joined family to cancer. They had all danced the dance of death and for them all death was a release of pain.

I do not personally feel that pain is the worst part of cancer. It does not help but being fatigued is really difficult to deal with. You feel like you are dancing a slow dance with death and keeping your body temperature up is hard. I still sleep under cover because I would get so cold. Even in the summer when I underwent radiation it felt like I was in an icebox. Sleeping all the time was a drag. However not being able to sleep was even worse until the pain pills kicked in. I was laying on the floor one morning in May with my dog Trooper. I could not rest because of the pain in my back. I woke up that morning and sent my husband away because I planned on killing myself. It was hard to get up and I fell back asleep a few times. Something though did wake me and I could hear a voice clearly telling me that I had done things my way. Now it was time for me to let him do things his way. It seemed as if I was sleep walking but I went over to the counter and looked at my pills. I upped the dosage on the Paxil and did away with the oxycontin. I had a really bad dream after taking that pain killer.

It was not long before I felt a lot better and I saw the coffee pot. I got up and poured half a cup. This was the first time in six months that I had drank coffee. I tell everyone today that if I start throwing up coffee I know that I have cancer again. But the slow dance you do when adjusting to coming back from cancer can be tense. Today they call that dance PTSS. Or post traumatic stress syndrome. It is not a great dance but you do it anyway. Some dances you want to turn down, others you know that you can't because you have to dance. So as Garth Brooks sand in the line.
"I would have missed the pain, but I would have missed the dance."
So for me the best of the dance was the wonderful people that I met, even if they too did the dance of death, they were special. For example Mrs. Lacy Ward taught me about a brush alter, the mourning seat and most of all through her life and death she taught me how to live. So this Dance goes on and now I do Relay For Life. That is one dance I would not miss even if it does bring back pain.


I Will Dance For the Rest of My Life

By Judy T. Lloyd

I will dance with you for the rest of my life.
Tell the maestro to play the music slowly.
Let me see all that is to be in glory.
I have danced many dances and know.
That in order to dance the dance of life, I must take it slow.

I have danced the dance called The Twist.
I danced it for all those that exist.
I have danced and sung so that they hear.
I hope no one else has to dance this year.

If I dance then maybe the pain comes again.
I will laugh as I dance in the rain.
No sweeter course than this dance I dance.
For I dance the dance of life against cancer.

"I do not consider myself as a person who is dying with cancer, but I consider myself as a person who is living with cancer."
Houston Webley 2003.

"Cancer survivors are people who are living with cancer."
Vandal Holman 2003.

"I could have missed the pain but I would have missed the Dance."
Garth Brooks

"Of all the diseases that I would chose to have it would be cancer, because cancer can be cured."
Judy T. Lloyd 2001

So I dedicate this book to all those who do the dance and run the Relay For Life. For all those who participate and make tommorrow possible.

"There is no beginning and no ending, there is only the middle."
Gilda Radner.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 23.12.2009

Alle Rechte vorbehalten