Just a Commentary: Why me?

There can not be a cancer victim who hasn't asked this question. Well, unless every woman in the past three generations and your siblings have developed breast cancer, and you really expected it, there can't be a breast cancer victim asking what have I done?

Now that I'm off work, it gives me plenty more time to think about this kind of thing. I know there are some who say that I have too many things going on in my head as it is, but this pretty much has taken over. It's hard to not get religious; to wonder if I did something to upset the good guy upstairs. I don't know, maybe calling him the "good guy upstairs" is wrong and deserving of some kind of ailment.

I mean, I was and I generally consider myself a good person. As I kid, I think back to my transgressions and all I can come up with is in kindergarten I stoled Laurie Goodway's little pocket book out of her coat pocket. I remember her crying to the teacher that it was missing and all of us kids having to help look for it. Maybe I got off a little too much on the power; knowing I had done this, caused all the scurry and created Laurie's tears. I had no particular animosity towards her, I just liked the little fish shaped change purse. I never confessed though. I brought the fish purse home and hid it in the bushes by my house. I do not recall that feeling of power being stronger than my feeling of guilt.

I remember stealing grapes from the A&P. I thought I was being very covert and I munched away on grapes while my parents did their grocery stopping. Surely this could not lend itself to a sentence of breast cancer down the road.

I was an okay student.....very shy...very shy. I got bullied a lot in school but it wasn't taken so seriously as it is now. It was a rite of passage mostly....my best defense was to cry. Surely I should have gotten points there...some kind of "get out of a malignancy" card just for enduring the dark times of adolescences. Back then it was just kids being kids and it was your problem if you were the weaker one.

I did get in trouble with the law once when I was 15. So did my father. It's a long story I'll make short but we both got arrested for petty larceny and trespassing. I got a warning as did my dad and a bill for $500 for an attorney. Surely not bad enough for cancer to strike 35 years later.

I think back to before I got married and I don't know of anything I did that could warrant this. When I was 19 years old, I did date a married man which I know is wrong but I still believe it was wrong on his side. I was just a kid and he liked me so overlooking a wife I never had to see didn't seem to be a problem. Like I said, I was just a kid.

So we're up to present day. I've been happily married for almost 24 years. Phil and I haven't cheated on our income taxes, or defrauded anyone; we obey all the rules. We were offended when the City of Edmond gave us a warning because our grass was too long: That's how seriously we take the rules. We've lived a benign life so why the cancer? Just thinking out loud.