Do you give thanks for your illness?

I dug into the archives of my own blog for this post. The first time I posted it, on Thanksgiving four years ago, I received a lot of comments. I thought it might ring true with some of you this year as well: Before diving into their turkey, most families take time to go around the table and say what they are thankful for.  Not my family.  We are all about the food in the Rosenthal household and we always have been. This doesn’t bother me.  I come from a very demonstrative family.  We express our gratitude on a regular basis, when it hits us in the moment.  We don’t store it all up for a once a year gratitude fest. I do have a ton that I am grateful for in my life.  But cancer is not one of these things.  Cancer has lead me to become a less judgmental person.  I listen to others now in a way that I didn’t before.  It has also turned me into a writer.  But I feel pretty confident that I’ve always had the capacity to become a less judgmental person and a writer.  If it didn’t come out through cancer, it would have come out through another, hopefully less painful route. A lot of survivors say that if given the choice they would chose to have cancer because they are grateful for the changes it has brought to their life.  In my book Everything Changes, I wrote about this issue at the end of my conversation with Greg, a young adult cancer patient in Alabama: “Had good things come from my own cancer? Yes, talking to Greg in his truck was one of many, but I be...
Source: Everything Changes - Category: Cancer Authors: Tags: Uncategorized thanksgiving cancer survivor Source Type: blogs