Shapes & Sizes

Gigantic. Mid-sized. Tiny. Microscopic. Amoebic. Too little to see, yet big enough to crush your life and the lives of everyone around you.

Cancer comes in many sizes and shapes. Somehow it creeps right in and can fit anywhere. 

In a leg. 

In a lung. 

In a lymph node. 

In your brain. 

In your breast. 

In your eye. 

In the pocket of your favorite pants.. 

In your mouth. 

In your skin, your blood. 

In anyone you love. (Or hate, for that matter. It doesn’t seem to be picky.)

In the moments you'd always envisioned, before they ever were, as free of worry and disease and distress and fear. 

In that split second where you’re about to fall asleep.

In the hours you want to sleep. 

In the years you'd have reserved for something (anything) else. 

In a casket. 

In the ground. 

In your tears. 

In the corners of our hearts that may never really “feel” actual cancer but will also never ever be able to feel free from the oppressive weight and eclipsing shadows of cancer either. It is not renting or leasing that space in our hearts. It is there to stay, stakes down, roots plunged and buried deep in our fleshy earth, bought with dirty blood money and a bully's IOU. It’s eyeing the rest of the space too, thinking about expansion. The worst roommate. It will not be evicted. It will not be moved. 

The shape of cancer you hear most, though? Fruit.

Why do we categorize both cancerous tumors and regular fetuses with the same un-metric system? You might say familiarity or uniformity for easy reference, but anyone who's ever perused a real-life produce section knows that watermelons come in all sorts of sizes. So do grapefruits, grapes. You’ve seen those freakishly large mutant strawberries that seem like maybe we’ve played god more than we ought to, haven’t you?

Maybe that's why some prefer to go with sports references—a tennis ball, a softball, a golf ball, where the size is more mass-produced and uniform. They told us at first, it was about the size of a tennis ball, but I get the feeling that if my brother Ben's cancer was the shape of anything, it would’ve been a bunch of huckleberries. More likely a pair of skis.