Children

It has been said cancer doesn't just affect you it affects everyone around you.
When I began chemotherapy, there were a lot of things in my life I needed to figure out. Instead of being given the choice to figure things out, there were people in my life that simply took over. I was never asked if this is what I wanted, or how did I want to handle things, it just was. And given the fact I didn't have much faith in myself I allowed it to happen. The idea was so that I wouldn't have any stress.
When I decided to leave my children in the hands of my neighbors, the only questions I got was why would you do that? Why wouldn't you leave them with family? For one, leaving them with family meant uprooting them and they had already gone through so much I didn't want to uproot their lives yet again. My ex-husband and I coexisited for the sake of our children, but I didn't feel that I could ask him to take them. I wish he would have simply offered, but that didn't happen either. I felt like this was all on me.
I didn't want my children to be with people who didn't respect me. I didn't want to leave my children with people who constantly harrassed me and wouldn't simply leave me alone for a month when I had asked. I didn't want to leave my children with individuals who believed to know more about my illness and what was going to happen to me based on statistics. The people I wanted to take care of my children didn't offer and I didn't feel comfortable asking them. I felt as though I was on my own. Hence, why they ended up with the people they ended up with. If my mother had been alive, there would have been no question in her mind. She would have gladly taken them.
Whispers and questions were floating around constantly. For one, I wasn't ready to share with anyone what I was going through. I wasn't ready to divulge what was said in every appointment and if there was a prognosis. Just because you are diagnosed with stage IV mestatic breasts cancer does not mean you are automatically going to die in five years.
I made it known that I wasn't ready to discuss this with anyone except those closest to me and that included my husband. What surprises me is how people react when they find out you have cancer. Don't presume to know all there is to know. Every individual has their own unique makeup and that is why chemotherapy is such a crapshoot as to if it's going to work or not.
I don't know about anyone else going through chemotherapy, but there are people out there who only want to help on a superficial basis. They are glad to give their opinion on what you to should do, but they don't want to roll up their sleeves and get dirty with you. Even though I wasn't ready to share that information with everyone, it still would have been nice for those closes to me to let me know they would be there for me if I needed them to be and they would be there even if it meant it would be inconvient for them. They would be there with me even if I didn't want them there in the doctor's office with me.
Conversations were going around as to what would happen to the kids if I were to die, where would they go. I was amazed how quickly people had opinions on this. I wasn't even close to death, yet this was being discussed. They go with their dad, plain and simple. Get over it.