Meeting New People and Finding Old Assumptions After Cancer

I have follicular lymphoma, a form of blood cancer that is considered very treatable, but chronic and incurable. I was diagnosed in July 2020 and declared to have no evidence of disease (NED; in remission) ever since December 2020.

Recently, I’ve been getting a little lonely; I’m retired, and most of my friends work, which limits their time. I’m far enough out of treatment, and I’ve been sufficiently reassured by the immunologist who assessed me, that I’m more willing to mingle with people I don’t know. Without a job, though, it’s harder to meet new people than it used to be, so I finally joined Meetup and went looking for crafting groups, because I enjoy fiber arts — crocheting, mostly — but also cross-stitch and needlepoint, and one of these days, I’m going to practice knitting enough to make it stick.

One of the groups I found is a fiber arts group that meets on a drop-in basis at a local coffee shop for several hours, and I’ve been several times. The last time I went, a few weeks ago, I met another cancer survivor. I forget how we got on to that topic, but somehow, we found ourselves discussing medical diagnoses and the difficulties in dealing with chronic cancers. In contrast to my own situation, this other person has a slow-growing, incurable form of liver cancer that is kept in check through periodic treatments, which started with surgery to remove as much of the cancer as possible. In the course of explaining the course of treatment, the other person asked how my surgery went, and seemed quite startled to find out that I hadn’t had surgery, and even more, that surgery is not a given for cancer treatment.

I’ve learned far more about cancer, and cancer treatments, in general, and lymphoma specifically, than I ever wanted to know. It’s the way I am; when I want to know about something, I start to research it, and the research can take me off into various tangents. I know other people learn differently, and some don’t do any research at all, but still, it was quite a shock for to me find out that this other person knew nothing about any other forms of cancer but the one they were being treated for, and assumed that all types of cancer were treated exactly the same way.

At this point, I expect people without direct experience with cancer to have assumptions rather than information, but until this encounter, I expected that other people with cancer would at least have talked to a few other people with cancer — in the oncologist’s waiting room, if nowhere else —and realized that not everyone else was following the same steps. That others might not garner at least a little general cancer information along their journey had never occurred to me, and it set me back. I’m not really sure why; I guess it’s because, like many people, I expect others to react kind of the same way I do. When this person didn’t, it made me second-guess my own actions, and I’m still not sure what, if anything, I want to do about it. So far, I haven’t done anything.

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