Diary of a Brain Tumor - The More You Don't Need to Know

Do you remember those commercial's...."The more you know!"

And my favorite...."Knowledge is Power!"

Those statements are perfectly, honestly, and totally true.  But sometimes, you just don't need to know everything.

I'm one of those people that when something new is about to happen in my life (good or bad), I want to educate myself.  I want to read & study everything I can get my hands on. 

Taking on a leadership position?  Read a book about what makes a good leader.

Putting together a big event?  Read articles about those particular events and find other Facebook pages/groups to exchange ideas.

Husband deploying?  Buy every single book about military life & deployment.  Read articles.  Join FB groups and more.

So when Nani was diagnosed with brain cancer, I did the same thing.  I scoured Amazon for books to read.  I "liked" various pediatric cancer and brain tumor FB pages & groups. 

But once those books started coming in and the articles kept showing up in my email and the links kept popping up in my newsfeed, something began to happen.  I didn't want to read them any more.

I tried.

I believed I had to educate myself about the journey that our family was about to take.  Our Team was very thorough about the type of cancer that Nani has and, in fact, encouraged us NOT to Google her cancer at all.  But, after almost 6 weeks, I let the demons win and I Googled her cancer.  But I never opened the articles.  The previews alone were enough to send me into a panic and would make me cry for days after.

I even stopped reading the books about others who had been through cancer.  Most of those stories did not have good endings.  I would hide the FB groups from my newsfeed and only go every once in awhile.  There were posts day after day of yet another child dying from cancer or another child relapsing.  As a mother with a child going through it, it was too much to bear.

But let's make one thing clear.  I know the reality of my daughter's diagnosis.  I know what "the statistics" say her prognosis and long-term survival rate for this type of cancer is.  But I needed to be positive....I needed to have hope.  I am not sticking my head in the sand and ignoring what could be.  I just didn't want to surround myself with all the sadness all the time.

In one of the books I started to read, the author was writing about her own diagnosis and one thing she wrote stuck with me.  She was talking about all the people she encountered that would tell her stories about people..family or friends....they knew that died from cancer.  She finally had to protect herself and she started saying, "If this story does not have a happy ending, I don't want to hear it."

That doesn't mean she was denying her diagnosis, she just chose to set the boundaries for how much sadness and reality she wanted in her life.  This is exactly how I feel.  I need to set the boundaries for myself and for my family.

So, I ditched the cancer books.  I started reading funny books....quick read books.  Books that would distract me and make me laugh until tears rolled down my face.  I started posting my daily morning funny on FB as well as looking for the humor and fun in our every day life.

And I realized that sometimes knowledge isn't always power.  Sometimes laughter and humor are just as powerful.