"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do." - Helen Keller

Have you ever seen the movie "The Shawshank Redemption"? In the movie, Morgan Freeman's character talks about how prisoners who are in the jail long enough no longer want to be freed. They have been behind bars for so long that it is the only thing they know and they need the prison. They become institutionalized. Our belief that prisoners behind the jail bars want to be released and live among us outside of the jail bars is subjective, none of us knows what it's like to be behind bars so long that the bars begin to feel like home.

It's a funny thing about cancer that so many people swear by the disease teaching them and showing them and enlightening them and yet there is not a single patient who wishes that he maintain his disease. Each person ever to experience cancer, either directly or indirectly, wishes that they never had - whether they are still alive or have since left us. I do not think it is very difficult to see why.

Of all the things in my life, I never thought I would be known for being sick. I never thought people would remember me for almost (hopefully) dying. There are a lot of ways that I would choose to define myself, but none of those ways could ever replace what I will undoubtedly be known best for: having cancer. Lance Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de France races - SEVEN - and I still think that he is better known for having had cancer. The man accomplished something in sports that had never happened and likely never will again. As for his cancer, people have overcome more difficult circumstances than he did. Even so, his cancer is more famous than he is. And the man was a world-class cyclist before cancer was even a whisper on his lips.

The hardened, rough cinder blocks barricade me in on three sides, above, and below. The steel bars close in the fourth side. Those metalic Ventian blinds open and close, the visual ebb and flow of what once was and what is to be. I can press my face between two bars, release my body weight, and hope to slip through the cracks, but this leaves a mark. My arms slide through the cracks and rest on the "outside" of the cell even though my body remains incarcerated. I oscillate - mentally, physically, and visually - between where I am and where I wish to be. If only it were a solid door, so that the sight of freedom would not tantalize the will and parch the soul. My body is separated - limb from base, mind from body, healthy from sick. A human jigsaw of adjacent opposites. Black borders white while good borders bad and dying touches living.

I am not a part of the prison. I am not institutionalized. I may have forgotten what it feels like to be on the outside, but I have not forgotten that being on the outside is where I want to be. I will accept my temporal seclusion because freedom lies up ahead. I have adapted to my cell, because adaptation means survival. The prison does not hold me, I hold the prison, and so I will learn to control my environment.

"Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment." - John Dewey