My 2 best features...screwed by cancer!

you deleted your post but I am sure we can all fill in the blanks.  This disease robs us of everything!  Our looks, our youth, our mobility, our jobs, our lives!  You name it and we lose it.  No one understands.  That is why I have missed these boards and the closeness you have with everyone here.  We all know, we all understand.  And we don't just brush it off with a you'll be ok, you still have whaterver!  I've never been one to cry and that is all I can seem to do anymore.  I am always in pain, my life sucks, my kids are busy with thier lives and don't need me around to help them all the time anymore.  I have no family close by so they are no help.  I have a few close friends and they seem to be moving further and further away lately.  Whats the point in fighting if you have no life to fight for?  I am sorry, this is about you and your problem and I try to rob it.  Just trying to show that this damn friggin disease leaves us with nothing!

The truely ironic thing is that our best features are taken from us...just about the time we are mature enough to appreciate them!   We spend most of our lives thinking we're too fat/thin, tall/short, our hair is too straight/curly our breasts are too big/small.  I had finally come to terms with what God gave me, and now I'd be so happy to have any of it back! 

glad to know I am not the only one who feels the same way.  It's hard to get excited about anything.  there's always this feeling of having a monkey on your back....and now every time we go in a store we'll be reminded of Christmas....and wondering if this will be the last one I spend with my children.  I hate myself for feeling this way. 

I wanna know what two best features we've all lost.

Me? I've always been overweight (ok fat:) and a  little cranky, I'm a big worrier and a pessimist (at times), so there is no big difference there. I havent had chemo (yet?) so I still have my old grey hair. BUT, there are two things I really miss:

1) I used to be sharp as a tack. I could work at a breakneck pace and get an amazing amount of work done with a high degree of accuracy and care. AIs have taken care of that along with other stage IV effects.

2) The great old Beatle song "When I'm 64" used to mean something.

           "o/~ will you still need me, will you still feed me...o/~ " 

Now its a song about other people.. No guarantees, I know. But it used to be pretty reasonable to think about what I'd do when my husband and I retire which was goign to be 10-15 years from now. Looks like I'm going to be taking "retirement" now without him-- and I don't know that I'll be up to any cross country Winnebago trips once he retires.

Ok, enough feeling sorry for myself. I've got it ok compared to many. Hang in there gals.--donna 

This video (link below) has been helping me with this stuff lately. It's of the Canadian Indian actress Lisa Ray, an otherworldly beauty, who was diagnosed last July at 37 with incurable cancer--multiple myeloma, to be exact, but she's in the same boat we are. She was immediately put on some kind of steroid treatment and the weight piled on; she's got the steroid moon face. And now, because she has a film coming out, she has to get out there and promote a movie she made before all this happened, when she was still lithe and a world class-beauty. She's by no means ugly now, but she's not the same. And just watch how she handles it in this video. That's her on the right in the film clip at the beginning and then that's her now talking, and she just doesn't seem cowed by this. She seems sparkling and unbeaten and unapologetic, and every time I look at this, I take strength from it. It can't be easy to have been called one of the ten most beautiful women in the world last year, and to have the press now saying, "The glamor is gone" (someone wrote that about her weight gain), and yet, she just gets out there and doesn't hunch down embarrassed. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKxAQJNMdUo 

I was diagnosed Jan 4, 2016. Stage IV. What started as unexplained arrhythmia, turned into BC in my liver, sternum bone, lungs, and left breast. I know I'm lucky that Ibrance/letrozole is really working for me. I'm healthy enough, right? When people tell me I'm lucky I don't have to have chemo/radiation my response is nicer than it should be. How am I lucky that the cancer has spread so much that it can't be cured? I have about a third of my hair. Again, I'm lucky I started with crazy thick wild curly hair and now its limp and straight? Im doing the Avon39 for the second year. I'm lucky that I wore an orthopedic boot and did PT for 4 months for a stress fracture after last years because my bones are weak? I know that I really am fortunate and any one of you ladies can feel free to tell me that. But when anyone else does its frustrating . I know it makes people feel better , but I'm a little busy trying to reassure my 3 teenagers that I'll see them graduate from college, once they get through high school. Thanks for the vent...

even though this thread is an old one, I just sat here crying while reading it because I feel all those things everyday, my heart is also broken yearning for who I used to be. I never realized how beautiful I really was and was always trying to look better and get fitter. I was in the best shape of my life running five days a week 6 miles or more daily within an hour and ten mins. I was like the wind. I was strong, I was toned, I was fine. Why couldn't I have stayed that way. I was happy. Content, comfortable in my own skin for once in my life. Now I have lost my long beautiful chestnut brown middle of my back mane. My best feature, and my shape , my one breast is gone, my stomach looks like a road map from all that surgery, and of course I have gained weight that I can't seem to get rid of. My hair was straight now it's curly. It was brown,now its salt And pepper. I don't. Want to see anyone I used to know. I can only go forward to met people who I don't know yet. That way they won't have their jaw hit the ground when they realize what has happened to me. I miss myself, I even see things differently , the sky, a breeze, like i know that I have a limited time to stand and feel this place and love harder than I could ever imagine possible before ? Why is it that we learn life backwards, but must live life forward ? If only we could go back. If only there was no cancer to harm our sisters or our mothers or our aunts or even uncles , fathers,brothers. In some cases. Cancer is just awful, it wears you down, makes you insecure,depressed,anxious,sick,tired,such pain, and to top it all off, the treatments Rob you of your outside while cancer robs you from the inside. I have had enough cancer please just go away and leave us alone. All of us! I am not an overally religious person, but feel like I have to hope in something , we sure could use your help with finding a cure down here god! ~M~

Micmel, you are so eloquent. When you say, "I even see things differently , the sky, a breeze, like i know that I have a limited time to stand and feel this place and love harder than I could ever imagine possible before ? Why is it that we learn life backwards, but must live life forward ?" I feel with you so much, it is a physical pain.