I like writing 10 things… so I’m going to write another blog post in that format except with only five. Yesterday was September 14th, 2014 and also the day of my neighbourhood’s annual Terry Fox Run. You see because Terry Fox ran for me in 1980, I also want his legacy to last, so I ran for my grandpa. During the times that my lungs were dying and I literally couldn’t breathe, I remembered the time I was in the hospital after my lungs collapsed and I was trying so hard to fight to live. I remember it all too clear, but what made me pound my chest right where the sticker of who I was running for, I remembered my grandpa who passed away. He had stomach cancer for 7 years! I can’t believe it. I still remember when I was almost 8 years old, when he had to leave Canada to go and have surgery. And right now, sometimes I dread his loss. He must have gone through so much more than what I went through in the hospital. So when I couldn’t breathe, I pounded my chest where I got surgery and pushed on. I wasn’t doing this for me, I had to keep going on because it was for him.

5. It sucks. That’s all I really need to say. As the years add on, I can’t believe the number of people I know that are affected by cancer quickly increase. It’s depressing, and most of all it sucks.

4. It’s unfair. Like what the heck is going on? She was all fine and then boom you hit again. You can’t just disappear in someone’s life and come back without any announcement whatsoever. It isn’t fair, how someone so kind like you, who’s lived such a crappy life deserves something so much better, but somehow you fell into the fate of cancer.

3. It hurts. I heard firsthand of what my grandpa had to go through. I went through something like it but honestly I was only in the hospital for a month and I recovered. But for so many people they stay and never come out. They might never get to eat the things they like as the case for my grandpa, or they may never get to walk, or they might not be able to move. All these things hurt. They hurt not only physically, but emotionally. I don’t know what’s worse emotional or physical pain, they’re both terrible things when mixed together in a concoction together.

2. It affects. It affects the victim, it affects the family, the friends, the community. It affects in a bad way it really does, but sometimes it may just create a lasting legacy for others to look up to you as a role model for the strength that radiates off cancer survivors and non- survivors as well.

1. It takes. It takes the aura of that person you love. It takes and takes and leaves almost nothing behind. It takes my heart, it really does, because when the person you love dies, cancer was the one who took them away. It doesn’t stop taking, and it’s so hard to get over the loss. One day they were there, and when the years pass by, you can’t believe how you were able to live on without them.