if we were a fairytale.

Kathy Griffin made a joke where she held the President’s severed head. She stooped to a sick level by performing this stunt, something she would have condemned were the president’s party aligned with her own.

Nobody who respects their reputation or their career does something like this and walks away with clean hands. The news constantly speaks of terrorism and violence and ISIS beheading another 100 Christians and all sorts of awful things, and Griffin thinks her act qualifies as mere “criticism”?

Honestly, Kathy Griffin can lose every dollar to her name and have completely deserved the loss. Nobody on either side of the political spectrum should ever condone what she did. I hate that it was done to Trump. I would hate it if it were done to Obama. They are U.S. presidents who we can freely criticize and mock, but pretending to have severed their bloodied head (and subsequently inadvertently show it to their 11 year old child) is tactless, tasteless, and unclassy. It’s not how politics should be discussed. It’s not how AMERICAN politics should be discussed.

So for most people, life gets shitty when you are diagnosed with a brain tumour at 21. My (then) boyfriend was. I witnessed a seizure one life-changing Tuesday morning and R was immediately rushed to a hospital where they did an MRI and found a mass of abnormal cells sitting in his brain. They said it was benign and stage one. They said they could easily remove it through an awake craniotomy (this basically means you need to be awake as a bunch of surgeons with half their face covered prod at your brain with needles and ask you whether you can move a finger or an arm). I haven’t ever been through this but I imagine it’s about as traumatic as traumatic gets.

Anyway. So they tell you they took the whole thing out and you go PHEW! We can finally go back to living like everybody else. Where your biggest problems are fights with family or job related stress. They tell us we need to do regular MRI’s ‘just to make sure’. No biggie. Sounds like a regular check up right? Plus the words Grade one benign all sound super in the terrifying world of tumours.

But six months later they found a shadow. They weren’t too sure what it was. And then six months later it was confirmed. It was a residual tumour. This means the surgeon left a part of it out because the location of the tumour was tricky. Taking the whole thing out could result in what they call “lesser function”. But okay, we said. A residual tumour is still in his brain. It might grow, they said. But it will be minimal growth and some people live their whole lives and the tiny tumour doesn’t do anything.

That was in 2014. Every six months, the tumour showed a minimal growth, like they predicted. But oh boy, were they wrong about the whole ‘it won’t do anything’. A brain tumour always does something.

Fast forward to 2016. R and I had been dating for almost 8 years. We both had stable jobs and wanted to get married. People looked at us and scoffed. We were 22 and 23. How can you even THINK of getting married at that age? My parents told me “the tumour will make your life difficult”. I knew it would. I didn’t care. We weren’t about to let it win. We were going to live our lives the way we wanted to live our lives. No tumour was going to stop us.