Choose Hope

Today our first guest blogger joins us, sharing his views on choosing hope.

Hope. A small word that carries so much meaning and power, especially for those patients and families dealing with cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

How do we keep hope when faced with a diagnosis, an unsuccessful treatment, a relapse or worse yet … the death of a loved one?  I have faced and tried to answer these questions on many occasions both for myself and others over the past nearly ten years since my daughter was diagnosed with and died from a rare form of histiocytosis.

Hope is difficult to sustain when confronted with a disease that does not have a cure, requires treatments that can cause additional pain and illness, and involves a risk of death as one of the potential complications.

Hope can be fleeting when the news of progress is only temporary or a relapse occurs after remission has finally been achieved.

Hope can be hard to find when you see a disease that causes so much pain and suffering for both the patient, as well and their family, friends and loved ones.

That is exactly why you have to choose hope, make a commitment to sustain hope and not lose hope for yourself and others.  I am not saying that this choice is easy and I myself have struggled with remaining hopeful.  When dealing with those struggles, I have relied on a quote from Lance Armstrong and a brief encounter with a pediatric cancer patient who embodied that quote.

Lance Armstrong wrote the following:

“If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them.

When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope?

We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or fight like hell.”

Part of the diagnostic process for my daughter involved her undergoing a bone marrow aspiration to determine if the disease had invaded her bone marrow.  She was not even a month old and was not able to receive any anesthetic during this procedure.  After the procedure, I was carrying her around the inpatient cancer floor trying to get her to calm down.  We walked into the play room where a 3 year old boy was sitting with his mother.  The little boy was bald from having received chemo and was attached to a IV pole.  He took one look at my daughter and asked if “she was sick too.”  When I told him that we did not know, he immediately and without any hesitation said, “That’s OK, I’m sick too, but we will both get better.”

Neither my daughter nor that little boy “got better.”  But I still to choose to hope for myself, for their memories, and for everyone else fighting against these terrible diseases.  It is one the best choices that I have made or will ever make.

I hope that you can find a way to make that same choice.

Michael Golding lives with his wife Leslie in Houston, Texas, where he is a Senior Attorney with Thompson,Coe, Cousins and Irons, LLP. In 2001, his infant daughter, Sydney, died  from a rare form of histiocytosis.  Since that time, Michael has worked to promote disease awareness, education, fundraising and parent support for the histiocytosis community.  He is one of the founding members and sits on the parent advisory board for the Histio Heroes Reseach Fund (HHRF) which supports the ground-breaking histiocytosis research being done through the Texas Children’s Cancer Center’s Histiocytosis Research Program.