You've Been Chosen by Cynt Marshall

Author:Cynt Marshall [Marshall, Cynt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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It wasn’t long after my failed trip to the office that I got an email that put some things into perspective. JTS, whose real name is John, is a brilliant and caring colleague and friend who lived in another state but had been following my cancer journey online. He took time out of his busy schedule to empathize with my situation. He mentioned that he suspected the hardest part, and the source of much of my frustration, wasn’t really the exhaustion, pain, or neuropathy. The hardest part for someone like me—someone like us, he actually said—must be living with a sharp mind that goes a hundred miles an hour and a frail body that just couldn’t keep up.

Bingo! JTS knew that I needed some reassurance that I still had it going on mentally, even if my body didn’t always cooperate. He also knew that what I really needed was a reminder to not try to keep up with my old physical pace. I was desperate to push myself, to prove to everyone, me included, that cancer wasn’t going to take me out. I had a life to live, and I wanted to live all of it. But with each round of chemo, as I got progressively sicker and weaker, that determination to push through was taking more of a toll. Even without the Mean O, I still wasn’t really ready for everything I wanted to do.

Sylvia and Venessa had seen something I couldn’t see that day in my office, and now JTS was giving it words.

It was okay for me to rest my mind for a few weeks to give my body time to catch up. It didn’t mean I was giving up.

I needed to learn to think differently about how I approached my life.

When the nausea rolled through my system, instead of resenting it, I used it as a reminder of how good homemade navy bean soup could be, especially the kind made by Lisa’s husband, Rick, the one who’d had so much trouble getting in to sit with me in chemo. He’d been through cancer himself when he was just twenty-seven years old, and navy bean soup was the only thing that he could keep down on the really hard days. When he found out I was sick, the first thing he said to his wife was, “I need to make Cynt some soup.” He did, and there were plenty of days when that was all I could keep down, too.

When the neuropathy left my fingers and toes ice cold and buzzing with nerve pain, I’d sink into the warm, blissful comfort of a pair of fuzzy socks and gloves. As my kids like to remind me, it wasn’t a fashionable look, but ten years later I still have a drawerful of fuzzy socks in all different colors, ready to match my outfit or to share with someone else who needs them.

It was harder to adjust my attitude when my doctor told me that my weakened

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