Confession .149. Chasing Dreams Like I’m On Novacaine…

Stay, You’re not gonna leave me
This place is right where You need to be
And why Your words gotta mean so much to them
And they mean nothing to me
So stay, You’re not what you’re hearing
Cause I’ve been watching You changing
And who said You’re one in a million anyway?

Don’t judge me. Girl-Tivi is less of the barefoot hippie I used to be… so boy-Tivi has to take over that role now. Lol.

Also, not to spoil the content of the post too much, but consider this your trigger warning. If death, near-death experiences, or cancer are triggers for you, then you may want to proceed into this post with caution.

Today, I saw a notice in one of the blogger groups I lurk in, and it caught my attention because it wasn’t one of the typical “So and so is looking for bloggers” notices. The advertisement was specifically for temporary bloggers, so of course I started wondering why temporary and went looking further. It turned out that the designer is selling this particular t-shirt (and a female version) in a Relay For Life vendor for the American Cancer Society, 100% of sales go to RFL, and she wanted a couple extra bloggers to really push this shirt because the fact that it’s a charity item really means a lot to her.

“Real Men Wear Pink” has always been one of my favorite pink male shirts to see in RL, so I tossed a notecard her way and voila, here we are! However, my reason for wanting to blog this particular shirt is a little bit deeper than that…

I don’t think I’ve talked a lot about my aunt, and the struggles that she was going through while taking care of my cousins. Like, I’ve talked a little bit about the boys and FENIB (Familial Epilepsy with Neural Inclusion Bodies… I think… it’s been awhile since I asked what the acronym for our disease meant…) – the family disease that both my uncles and 2 of 4 of my cousins so far have died from. But I never really talked about my aunt – the woman who lost her husband to the disease first, and now her two sons. Her daughter has a bit of a mild case, but she’s still fluctuating back and forth between that denial phase and the “Why the fuck bother, I’m just going to end up like my brothers,” phase so they haven’t had a chance to test her further/study her form of the condition/etc.

Kris and Kyle both grew up visiting their dad in the nursing home… watching them slowly become a non-verbal vegetable. My aunt always promised them that if, god forbid, either or both of them wound up sick, she would do everything within her power to keep them at home for as long as she could. She wouldn’t let them rot away in a room, surrounded only by workers, and family who visits every so often. And bless her, she did so well, despite everything she was going through.

She had bought her parents’ old house, right next door to hers, and moved the boys in there, so she could just go back and forth between the two houses. At first, she only brought in nurses for the essentials, only things she couldn’t do herself. But after awhile, she started to get sick. She assumed she was just run-down from the work it took to care for both of them, as their conditions deteriorated around the same time… they were only a few years apart, if that. But after she found a lump in her breast and went in for some tests, it came back that she did, in fact, have breast cancer.

And at this point I would’ve been done. I would’ve thrown my hands in the air like, “Alright, Universe, I don’t know what I did in a past life to piss you off, but I get the message.” She watched her husband die like that… she was watching her children suffer it now… and then to get cancer herself? But where I would’ve given up, this woman became the most POSITIVE person I’ve ever met. She’d find any little thing to be positive about that she could in a day and just move on with life, day by day.

She brought in nurses and others more often than before, so that she could get rest when she needed it, but for the most part, she was still the boys’ sole caretaker, and she had kept them at home. She went through her treatments, including a double mastectomy, and it came time now for her to get her implants. I don’t know if they got infected, or if her body rejected them, or both… but as if shit could not get worse she wound up INCREDIBLY ill after her implants, had to get them removed, and redone again at another point.

Some of you are starting to see why I work closely with Breast Cancer charities in SL in particular…

But you know what? Despite all of that, she still remained one of the strongest women I’ve ever met in my life. Kyle died at home a little less than 2 years ago – she’d kept her promise to him. And Kristopher, bless him, died in a nursing home, but he’d only been there for the last couple months of his life. Only when he got to that point where he was just constantly in bed, not really able to move on his own or help in his movement at all. That’s when it got to be too much to keep him at home and she had to break that promise… but you know that broke her heart. She wasn’t just pawning him off on someone else… she was still there visiting all the time… and for that last week of his life when he was in a medically-induced coma just waiting to let go, she refused to leave his side for a week… she slept at the nursing home… she was right there. It wasn’t until the night that the nurses convinced her to go home and get some sleep in a real bed that he passed. He didn’t want to let go in front of his mom. That is, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I heard out of that whole ordeal.

So, yes, while the ACS does not only focus on Breast Cancer, this particular shirt does, and is again donating 100% of the proceeds from each sale to RFL. And now you know why that was important to me, and why I had to jump on the opportunity to blog this particular piece of clothing.

Thanks for listening. ♥

Shape || Mine
* Head || Daniel Head (v3.0) | Catwa
Skin || Zack Skin (Cotton Tone) | Stray Dog
* Hair || Envy (Unrigged; Blonde HUD) | Stealthic Hair
* Shirt || Think Pink Shirt | Viki | new! | 100% proceeds to RFL!
– The female version of this shirt comes fitted to Belleza Freya, Isis, Venus; Maitreya Lara; Slink Hourglass and Slink Physique. The male version is fitted for Belleza Jake; Signature Gianni (pictured); and Slink Physique Male.
Jeans || Broberry Jeans (Cerulean) | Deadwool