Monique

Monique left a wonderful message on my post Now I'm public. I think I know who Monique is. I think she survived breast cancer and wrote a funny book about it.

This got to me on two levels. The personal one is that she is saying that losing a baby is the most painful experience that a woman can have. It is very painful indeed, but beating cancer is not a walk in the park either. You get hit like that and then people admire you and say that they couldn't have the courage to go through that... courage? what courage? I didn't choose to have a dead baby or get cancer... Once you get it you either go through it or you don't. Did I try to make good out of it? I did, but I didn't feel brave or courageous.

When we were a month or two out of our ordeal, my husband's friend just got diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. I never met him before and you can imagine that I was quite anxious. We got along very well... we seemed to be in the same emotional spot: me after my baby's death and him after finding out that he had cancer. We visited him again a few months later... after a couple of series of chemotherapy he was much deepened in the pain and really hard to get to. That's when I realized that I am doing better: I was going back towards life. Cancer eventually beat him.

The other reason why finding Monique's story and book pleased me is that someone I work with is going through breast cancer right now. Breast cancer seems to get closer and closer: a good friend's mother, my own scare a few years back that got me reading about it, my mother's cancer found and resolved in a very early stage... I am not so close to this woman, but I admire her trying to keep working through this and I wanted to find something nice for her. I have problems expressing my feelings (duh), so I need a nice something. A funny book about going through cancer seems like the perfect something.

Thank you, Monique for writing the book and touching my life!