Can we still be friends?

Or is cancer always the loudest voice in the room?

I feel myself descending into a pretty self-absorbed place since the diagnosis. I was texting with a friend about my ass tumor and only learned later that she had literally given birth THAT MORNING. To be fair, he came three weeks early and I had no way of knowing that, but still! Other people have real lives with real things going on! I need to remember that the entire universe is not contained in my ass tumor.

I feel a very heightened risk of myself becoming a shitty friend who forgets to ask about other people’s pain or problems or joys and ambitions while my world narrows to the size of a polyp.

I also fear becoming the person no one wants to share their stuff with - good or bad - because my stuff is “bigger” and overshadows everything else.

A dear friend who has been so supportive of me through every step of this, leveraging her nursing experience to help me interpret MRI findings and talk through treatment options at length, is pregnant with her first baby. It was twins and she lost one of them, and is struggling with the emotions of the moment. And I fear I’m sucking all the oxygen out of every conversation just by the sheer existence of this pulsing polyp that seems to blot out the sun. It’s so noisy even in its silence.

My brother is about to undergo a dramatic jaw surgery with an intense recovery period and felt a need to ask permission to discuss new details from his surgical team on the sibling group text. Or did I want to keep the floor? My gosh, what kind of monster am I at risk of becoming?

And equally, what monster are the people around me complicit in creating if they insist on treating me this way?