As
you have probably determined by now, I love reading the perspectives of my
family and loved ones. When my best friend, Ashanti, offered to write a guest
post for me, I jumped at the chance. Here's her take on my RA. I love you
Shanty! (I will caution, there's some language in this post.)
“I’m
not dying of cancer, so I try to remember that often” is one of the things Kat
texts me. She’s one of, if not the bravest
person I know.
Kat’s
been my friend since freshman year of high school, even though she didn’t know
it at the time. I had long curly purple and blue hair and she claims I scared
the bejeezus out of her when, thinking to myself, she looks weird like me, maybe we’d get along, I plopped
myself down in front of her on the gym floor comparing converses and nine inch
nail albums. I consider us close; like most girls we’ve had times where we
wouldn’t speak to each other, but we still always came together in then.
Honestly,
if most of my friends said, at least I don’t have cancer, I think I’d slap
them. That’s because like opinions and assholes, every body’s got problems, and
they are mostly full of shit. Right now, my biggest problem is keeping my
family afloat. Because of a long confluence of circumstance I’d rather not
delve into, I’m in a position where for this month, I’m keeping a roof over my
dad, stepmom and brother’s head (and my own). Next month is a little less
shaky, but I don’t doubt I won’t have to do it again. It’s a good deal of
pressure for a twenty-two year old making just a smidge above minimum wage, but
still well below the poverty line for where I live. I don’t think I’ve been
dealt a poor hand; its just life. Generally speaking, most of my friends have
it easier.
By
all normal reckoning, her problems are worse. Typically, I’d like to say that
pain is pain and can’t be compared. People experience suffering against their
own baseline, and if their tolerance is low, a minor embarrassment is the end
of the world. So, first of all, I don’t think any of my friends would have
cancer as a frame of reference, but if it was in their periphery and they said
that, I’d have a pretty low tolerance for it. Because they have no idea what it
means. I have no idea what it means.
She
doesn’t have a death sentence, and yet it was still really hard to hear. Rheumatoid
Arthritis. How does that happen? I mean, she tells me about her doctor’s visits
(I’ve accompanied her to a few), and my first thought is never at least its not
cancer. She pulled that out. I’m going through a bit of our shared history
because I think she was dealt a raw hand to begin with. And high school, let’s
be honest, wasn’t pretty for either of us. We were both depressed, weird,
anxious. Thing is, it was usually beyond her control; mine was created, to her
bad things happened. While I still piss and moan, because I’ve encountered few
rare crises in my life, she bears it.
Things
are hard for her, and they always will be, but after the diagnosis, after
figuring out what was going on, everything changed. Its like she decided she
wasn’t going to put up with being unhappy. She wasn’t going to take RA’s shit.
She’s working on not tolerating her doctor and nurses when they tell her in
dressed-up terms, "I don’t know". Or even worse, "I don’t
care." For this, I admire her greatly. She doesn’t believe it, but she
will accomplish so much in her life.
So
what I can do, as the friend? Drive her to her appointments when I can, and
gossip and treat her like she’s normal. Because, guess what? She is. She is
still Kat. She still has just as much smarts as when she would color code her
notes in her minuscule handwriting for AP classes. She has even more
strength now than she did before. She’s just as funny, caring and Daft Punk
obsessed as always, and a diagnosis cannot take that away.
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