Step one — get used to it

After you've been told of your fresh status as someone with cancer — you're sent home to get used to the idea.

It's quite surreal, because it's normally something that happens to other people and it's strange to look at cancer as something of your own.

Thinking of it may bring up hope of finally winning the lottery because that's another thing that usually happens to others, but you soon realize that these are wrong assumptions and the only thing that happened to you is your cancer. Bummer. It would have been much easier to look at €25.000.000 as your own, wouldn't it?

It's not simple to look at cancer as something that happens in your own body.

There's a strong sense of betrayal. Your body is cheating on you.

I'm a cynical person. I make dark jokes about it. Some of my friends and relatives find it hard to take it. But it is my own way of coping. If I got so far as having cancer at 39, it must be a joke. And the joke can either be on me or on the cancer. And it is my own personal preference that the joke won't be on me.

I chose the path of talking about it, out loud and clear. No whispering of the C word.

No euphemism. It is cancer, not an exotic Texan Virus.

Another thing is to find someone or something to blame.

I tried and tried and couldn't find anything.

Although i'm a heavy smoker, although I'm a devoted coffee drinker, I've had my share of alcohol consumption to last for a lifetime of drunkenness and I'm a not exercising if it's up to me — hodgkin's Lymphoma has no causes, at least not causes that have anything to do with me.

The majority of the patients are men, HIV positive with history of immune system issues.

I'm not part of any majority related to this particular cancer.

The odds would be for me to have breast cancer - just by being a woman, or lung cancer for being a smoker, or skin cancer for spending most of my life under the Israeli sun (including the full length of the 80's — when we used baby oil to properly fry ourselves).

So why me? Why now?