From The Heart

The Truth About Self-Preservation

The Truth of Self-Preservation

By Charlie Shields

In the world today, survival runs through the bones of the people since the dawn of time. From the need of the nomads in 8000 BCE, for protection and companionship to the modern day. Self-Preservation is what pushed us each and every day. To get up. To handle school and the drama that comes with it. For me, is surviving the inevitable. The dreaded "c" word that takes about 20,000 people a day. Away from love, family, and the living. A life is gone because it is uncontrolled and does not discriminate; children, adults, elderly, white, black, Muslim, Jewish, it doesn't matter who they are, age race or religion, the killer is cancer. Cancer is the worst word that many people face each day, week, month and year. The worst is not what it does to you, but to those around you. You would rather suffer alone than make them suffer, unable to help, just plain helpless in making you better. They will see your hair fall out in great clumps if you were to even brush your hand through it. They see the fear, the tears and the pain you face each day. Self-preservation is more than you surviving and living to get another hour or even a day, but it is your family as well, keeping that small sad smile on their face for you. Their mind, hoping and praying that you live, but the fear that you don't.

Everytime time I looked into my parent's eyes, I could see more fear each day I grew weaker. The family that we hadn't seen in years coming together, their sympathy constricting, their "sorry for what you are going through" naive to the pain and the suffering. It had always seemed like death or even pain is what brought us together, not happy, only grief. I always asked myself why my family wasn't a family. Eventually, the results came back, and I was diagnosed with stage II lung cancer. I was lucky to breathe each day I did. I feared the day I would be forced to stop. Life as it was dissipated. Every day was about my survival, me living, while my brothers were left second to me. How much I continue to hate myself for it. Life hasn't been kind to those who chose to live it. In my case, I am constantly faced with the fear of it occurring again. Self-preservation holds so much meaning and quite frankly, it is one word I wish humans didn't have to face, with the need to survive comes to the pain and the suffering, and it seems endless.

As I write this, I have no idea how to explain what self-Preservation means to me, but I can only attempt to describe. In my life, not everything has been easy, but it could've been worse. Imagine you're given a gift, one you did not expect, such as a necklace, eventually over time it starts to turn almost rusty and one day you lose it. Maybe it had been in your family for generations. Much like survival eventually you surviving is going to end, prematurely or later but it will happen. That's the sad truth. Each day we live, we are closer to not survive.

Self-preservation seems like something to fear. However, at the same time, cherish because at the end of the day I am still here and somehow survived from medicine and by my own will. Quoting my mother and saying she is right is something no teenager really likes to admit without blows to their pride, but she once said, "By God, I'll be damned, if I let you take her away too. My baby will fight and beat all odds thrown at her." Never truer words, though I was young and naive, as she thought I understood so much more. I knew something was wrong and I knew I was the cause of my parent's sadness and my older brothers as well. I was the cause of their pain, but I also wasn't. It was the faulty gene that I somehow just got stuck with that cancer. I was a child who didn't know how to live because I had barely begun to.