If you didn’t laugh you’d cry

 

To celebrate the International Day of Cancer, 4 February I attended a play: Amazon Cancer Warriors: An Ode to Courage written in French by an American author Mary Weed Pickens herself battling through leukaemia.  You can’t get any closer to the coal face than that, and we were all there for her, packed in tight, sitting on the hard wooden benches in the stifling heat of the village hall because the big C is a stranger to no one. 

The play is set in the waiting room of a hospital Oncology Unit, one of the saddest places in the world:  Four women, four different nationalities meet every month for treatment.  Four individual stories, four lives torn apart.  It wasn’t sad, it was funny.  We laughed and the more we laughed the sadder it became but there were no tears, tears were of no use to anyone.  Laughter was the only option delivered to the audience in a take it or leave it approach – I have cancer now laugh with me.  And when Mary Weed Pickens wrote An Ode to Courage, during what I can only imagine were terrible months of quiet, bleak despair in hospital, it was HER only option.  Humour became her friend, her companion on the battlefield and last night we all enlisted along with her.  

There were many jokes about doctors:
What is the difference between God and a surgeon?  God would never pretend to be a surgeon.

About the Swiss and Switzerland:  Einstein wanted to die in Switzerland because everything happens here 25 years after anywhere else.

And dark humour about the horrors of the illness itself. ” How slim you are looking”, women tell me,  “I wouldn’t mind some of that.”

During dinner afterwards I sat opposite Virginie who courageously recounted her own personal battle with breast cancer and her decision not to take the medication following treatment.  As she was speaking I felt the air turn thick and still around us as if the world were collectively holding its breath. 

“The side effects were so terrible I was unable to move, to walk my dogs, to garden… so I flushed them down the toilet.  At first my oncologist thought I was mad but I have decided that I would rather take the risk of a shorter life of quality rather than a life that gives me no quality.”

In the play the character of Mary says that she wakes every day and thinks Yippee I’m alive! Another day!

None of us know when we are going to die but we should live as Mary tells us to and greet every day with wonder and joy as if it were to be our last.  Oh and of course laughter, lots of laughter because if you didn’t laugh you’d cry.