Time to Heal

I love writing.  I feel such a sense of accomplishment after taking my thoughts and sorting them, aligning them, and making them concrete, turning them into something that anyone can read, understand, and feel.  There is a power in naming something, in finding just the right words for just the right time.  Some days, the words flow freely, thoughts leaping from my head onto the page with no hesitation.  Other times, the words need to be coaxed out, shy at first, but gradually growing bolder as their numbers swell and they find their direction.  But sometimes, very rarely, the right words elude me completely.  I know what I want to convey, what I need to share, but none of the words I put together are right.

This is one of those times.  And since my own words are failing me, I have to rely on the words of others:

"After more than a year of diagnosis, treatment and waiting, it's almost as if, finally and unexpectedly, my psyche heaved a sigh and gave itself permission to implode. ... It's harder to write about the weight of depression than it is to write about ... cancer and its physical indignities.  Cancer is clear biological bad luck.  But depression, no matter how much we know about it, makes part of me feel as if it's somehow my fault, that I'm guilty of something that I can't quite articulate."

Thank you, random stranger on the internet, for giving me the words that I could not otherwise find.

The last two months have been hard.  Physically, a cold turned into a sinus infection that wasn't quite gone when I picked up a respiratory virus just at the same time that allergy season kicked into full gear.  I've been tired, just making it through the days until I can crash.

Mentally, things weren't any better.  I have felt like the world is closing in on me and like everything is spinning out of control.  I have felt like there isn't any point and I've wanted to quit everything.  I have been an emotional wreck, getting angry over little things and weeping over nothing.  I have been distracted and not at all productive, avoiding pretty much everything.

I have not been myself.

And even after realizing that something was definitely wrong (which, looking back, took an embarrassingly long time), I still struggled to admit it.  I feel like I should be fine.  I've been given the all clear by my doctor, so why am I still not better?  (He assures me, by the way, that this is all normal, which makes me feel a teeny bit better about everything.)

Remember in the previous post when I mentioned that there is no timeline for recovery?  The last two months really hammered that home for me.

So I'm taking some time off work to get myself back together.  I'm going to catch up on life, on all the little things that piled up or were put off over the last year.  I have a referral to see someone who specializes in cancer counseling and will hopefully be able to start seeing her soon.  And I'm going to get myself back into shape physically, because I know that will help me feel better mentally too.

As hard as it was to admit, I desperately need this.  It's time to focus on getting myself better.  It's time to do some healing.

Time Flies

Last February/March, our world was shattered and our lives fell apart.  It was an incredibly stressful time, full of doctors appointments, tests, and uncertainty.  There was a (thankfully brief) period of time, early on, when we thought I was dying.  We talked about death in our own way, stressing that no matter what happened to me, life must go on.  We were so relieved to learn that even though things would be just awful for a while, I would make it through.  The road would be long and it was hard to picture the end, but we had a path to follow.

I can't believe it's been over a year already.  How far we have come since then.

Here's what everyone has been waiting to hear:  my PET scan in February looked good.  There was still slight metabolic activity in the mediastinum (where the tumor was), but it was significantly smaller than in my pre-radiation scan (and a biopsy showed no sign of active disease at that point already).  My doctor suspects this is just minor residual inflammation that will die down in time - nothing to be concerned about.  This means I've moved from active treatment to long-term monitoring:  for the next year, I'll get a CAT scan every 3 months.  Assuming they all look fine, they'll start spacing out how often I'm checked.  And if everything looks good for long enough, we'll reach the point of confidence that if the cancer was going to return, it would have already.

When I reflect back on the past year, the details are already blurring.  It is hard to remember the pain:  not that I really want to anyway, but the brain does an incredible job of dulling unpleasant memories.  On a day to day basis, I feel like I am back to my old self, able to just live life without extra planning or contingencies.  It's surprisingly easy to fall into thinking that things weren't so bad.

But every now and then I get caught off guard by something - a smell or noise, fatigue at an unexpected time, a specific task that is more difficult than before - that can bring up the memories in sharp detail and the pain is real again.  I have to remind myself that this is okay, that there is no timeline for recovery, that this experience is not something you just get over.  Thankfully these moments are becoming less frequent the more time that passes.

The past year was life altering.  I can never be "back to normal", because that normal doesn't exist any more.  After everything fell apart, we've had to build it back up again.  Priorities have shifted.  Plans have changed.  Goals are different.  And that's okay - I like where things have ended up.  I feel more alive in the present than ever before.  You know all those things that you talk about doing but never get around to?  (We should hang out more!  I'd love to come for a visit some time!  That new class sounds interesting, maybe I should try it!)  I realized that I should just do these things instead of just talk about them.  Novel concept, right?

I also realized that I've finally fully embraced being a cancer survivor.  Like any other single label, it is not all that I am and cannot wholly describe me.  But my cancer story has become woven into the fabric of my life in such an integral way that it has become part of a larger, beautiful work and could never be separated from who I am.  I am so many things, cancer survivor included.