This past weekend, I had my 20-year high school reunion. I’m one of those weirdos who actually enjoyed high school (at least, as much as a person can), and I’ve even stayed friends with a core group from those days.

 

At points when we should’ve gone our separate ways, life has thrown curve balls that brought us back together. Our freshman year of college, a dear friend’s younger brother died in a car accident. My mom passed similarly in the middle of our college years, and several other friends lost parents or close loved ones in the couple of years following college graduation. We all rallied around one another in those times of strife, drying tears, offering shoulders to lean on and laughs to help dull the pain.

And from there we continued to see each other–weddings and all the accompanying hoopla turned into baby showers and christenings. Sure, sometimes years will pass before we see each other, but we’re the type of friends who can get together and it feels like no time has elapsed since our last meeting. We just pick right up where we left off.

As I danced and laughed and reminisced with them this past weekend, I experienced that strange feeling of being back with a group that was my world for a time, even though they no longer hold that status in my life. It’s strange to return to a place/group of people you once thought of as a sort of home when that’s no longer your day-to-day neighborhood.

I had this same sensation last week at the cancer center. For so much of this past year, that place has felt oddly like home to me. Its inhabitants–the doctors, nurses, staffers and fellow patients–they were my people. Just like my high school friends, they get me in a way few do. They understand a very important time in my life the way no one else really can.

But as I sat in the waiting room, my mass of chemo curls spilling around a headband’s tenuous grasp, I began to realize I no longer belong there the way I once did. And as my oncologist went over my whistle-clean lab work and told me I was going to be just fine, I felt this even more acutely. I don’t look sick. I don’t feel sick. I’m not sick.

And just like that guy who graduated five years ago and still hangs out at high school parties, I need to move on. I need to re-enter the world. I need to take cancer patient off my list.

My high school experience is a big piece of who I am, and those friends will always be a part of my life. Same thing with cancer. This disease has changed who I am. There will never be a time that I don’t return to this place, never be a time that it’s not part of my life. Just as my adolescent years helped shape me, so has my bout with this disease.

I don’t want to go back to high school or my teen years, and I don’t want to go back to being a full-time patient. But knowing those who were there for me during both those times will be there for me now, and in the future if I need them, is a great comfort.