Opinion: A Piece of My Mind — Don’t Waste Your Cancer

In eighth grade, instead of going to the annual class trip, I reclined in a hospital bed on the ninth floor of the cancer hospital. And instead of being handed an invitation to the eighth grade dance (though under normal circumstances, I’m not sure this would have happened either), I received a 16-page long article titled with an exhortation, Don’t Waste Your Cancer,¹ by John Piper. This article was a black-and-white missive among the many well-wishes and flowers that had, up until that point, told me it was OK to lie in bed and focus solely on the nasogastric tube in my nose, the pain pump to my right, and the urging of my bowels to pass gas, which I was told would come sooner or later. But no, this article, from some well-wisher, instead felt like God herself had placed a pile of excrement into my unwilling hands and hurriedly exclaimed, “Don’t drop it!”