Holidays are hard when you're not waffling in this weird state of mixed gratitude and frustration, when everyone is getting along and healthy and happy, when there is enough money and time to buy and make all the gifts you'd really like to give, when the weather does what it ought to do and sets the mood for the season. When any of those things are out of whack, it gets hard to find the spirit for christmas. It just didn't feel like it was ever actually going to happen, but it happened and in spite of my lack of christmas enthusiasm, it was nice to spend time with family and friends visiting from their far-flung homes. Sitting around a table last night I laughed more and harder than I have in weeks, maybe months. Thank you for that, friends.
Today I spent a substantial part of my evening looking up plastic surgeons. I am doing the slow, strange, mental work of giving myself over to the reality of my reconstructive option - an implant. Three months ago I hated the idea. Now I'm looking at surgeons' portfolios, assessing their skill, checking their credentials, and doing it all without crying or feeling sorry for myself. That's a big deal. In a way, to accept that an implant is what is available to me (given that I opt to have reconstructive surgery instead of wearing a prosthesis every day) is to accept what happened in September. I've struggled to accept that that tissue transplant failed inexplicably, as in rare cases they do. But to really take that in, to swallow it up and make it part of me, I have to acknowledge that it is unsafe, ill-advised, and unpredictable to think of reconstructing my breast with my own tissue again, which means that my plans for achieving normality post-cancer are shot to shit. It also makes my body feel unreliable which is pretty much the last thing I wanted to feel while fighting the mutation of my very own cells that could have killed me. Implants don't last that long and so will need to replaced at least once and likely more than once, which means that breast surgery is set to be a part of my life for good and I'm not crazy about that plan. So it goes.
I finish chemo on January 30th. A month after that I'll be cleared to start reconstruction which begins by having a balloon-like sack inserted under the muscle on the chest wall. Once that incision has had a month to heal, I'll go in for weekly-bi-weekly saline injections to fill up the tissue expander and stretch the breast mound which will probably take about six weeks. Once the skin and tissue have been stretched to the appropriate size, it'll be given a few weeks to settle at which point I'll go in to have the expander removed and replaced with a regular implant. From everything I've read, it seems like it could be a three to five month process just to get the implant in place, which is hopefully but not necessarily the end of the reconstructive surgery. It's a short time in the long-term, though that's sometimes hard to remember when the end looks this far away.
Tomorrow is new year's eve. I've never been so ready to say good bye to a particular year.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
the hard part
I apologize to anyone who reads this, or hopes to read it, with any sort of regularity. As I've settled in to the routinized, slow portion of the cancer ordeal, I find myself having less to say about it. Scratch that. That's not accurate; I've got plenty to say and all sorts of things going on in my head re: cancer, but it's more difficult to process. Lacking events to report on means that my writing needs to draw almost entirely from what I'm thinking and feeling and there are a few issues with that. One, it's harder. Way harder. Two, it's intimate. There are some things I can't find my way through and I'm not sure all of you, or any of you, can come with on that journey. Three, it's more complicated which means the writing and sorting out is more demanding and most days it feels daunting to think of sitting down to write when it takes so much out of me just to get through a full day of work, or an empty day that begs filling with anything but time alone with my thoughts. Finally, it's repetitive. If my thoughts feel repetitive to myself, they'll surely be so to you. I think going over and over things in my own mind is part of the process, but I don't know that you all want to read variations on a single entry over and over. That said, this is sort of where my head's been of late...
The lump in my throat is persistent, an emotional weight and a distinct physical presence - a pill that lodged itself in my esophagus a week and a half ago and will not budge. It fuels the ever-present nausea, a mild irritation rising each time I swallow, the rippling of my esophagus pushing against the lump. There is a stomach-churning medicinal smell, acid, metallic, chemical, that arises unannounced -a rush to the olfactory system, swift and profuse- triggered by science classrooms, tomatoes, soaps and surface cleaners, the clean dish-soapy smell of recently washed glasses, and occasional fruits. It catches in my nose and throat, pungent, heavy, and hard to place. The odor comes from the infusion room, some combination of the port flush fluid and hospital grade cleaning products. I wish it would stay there. Jason cannot smell it even as we sit in the room together while I get my treatment. During our first visit, I could not smell it either.
My appetite returned with a vengeance a few nights ago as I readied myself for bed, sweet relief after having consumed roughly 1,200 calories over the course of three preceding days. Exhausting, sick-feeling days when my stomach both craved and rejected the nourishment the rest of me needed to will myself off of the sofa. I threw up for the first time. Lucky, I know. I really do know how very lucky I am, but at some point the source of gratitude starts to run dry. Whether or not this could be worse, this is my present. my life. and it kind of fucking sucks. It's taxing and depressing even to be a fortunate chemo patient.
As I come to the end of this set of medications and prepare to switch to to one single medication that promises to be easier on my system, I find I am emotionally conflicted. At once I am aware that I ought to feel nothing but relief - the situation which has not even been that bad is about to vastly improve (save the disappointing, if minor, side effect of losing my eyebrows and eyelashes), but what I actually feel is a sort of desperation. that I might crack at any moment. that in the face of the anti-climactic shift beyond the chemotherapy halfway point which should be a celebratory moment, all I really want to do is hide in a puddle of blankets and weep. In absence of the sense that I am or could be dying right now it is easy to lose track of why this is happening, why I chose it. Fear of death is too far off to inform my emotional reaction to chemo. Because I'm not dying now. So I'm not afraid of that. The fear that paralyzes me is one that no one can answer to - that this will come back and kill me in a five years, in a decade, at some sad mid-life time. Maybe this medication is stopping that from happening. Maybe it isn't. My sense of purpose wanes. Why these days sick and lonely, this burden to my family and friends, this financial stress? It is difficult to picture the future for which I am fighting when I feel so thoroughly wedged into an overwhelming, painful, present. Harder still when it's the things that future could hold that both give me hope and scare me senseless, so I try not to think much about it.
I can't figure out which is better: to feel this, the middling frustration and mental brittleness, the vague purpose and pervasive loss, or to perpetually remind myself that otherwise I might die from this disease. Which fear is greater? more damaging? more productive? more healing? more real? I wish I knew.
The lump in my throat is persistent, an emotional weight and a distinct physical presence - a pill that lodged itself in my esophagus a week and a half ago and will not budge. It fuels the ever-present nausea, a mild irritation rising each time I swallow, the rippling of my esophagus pushing against the lump. There is a stomach-churning medicinal smell, acid, metallic, chemical, that arises unannounced -a rush to the olfactory system, swift and profuse- triggered by science classrooms, tomatoes, soaps and surface cleaners, the clean dish-soapy smell of recently washed glasses, and occasional fruits. It catches in my nose and throat, pungent, heavy, and hard to place. The odor comes from the infusion room, some combination of the port flush fluid and hospital grade cleaning products. I wish it would stay there. Jason cannot smell it even as we sit in the room together while I get my treatment. During our first visit, I could not smell it either.
My appetite returned with a vengeance a few nights ago as I readied myself for bed, sweet relief after having consumed roughly 1,200 calories over the course of three preceding days. Exhausting, sick-feeling days when my stomach both craved and rejected the nourishment the rest of me needed to will myself off of the sofa. I threw up for the first time. Lucky, I know. I really do know how very lucky I am, but at some point the source of gratitude starts to run dry. Whether or not this could be worse, this is my present. my life. and it kind of fucking sucks. It's taxing and depressing even to be a fortunate chemo patient.
As I come to the end of this set of medications and prepare to switch to to one single medication that promises to be easier on my system, I find I am emotionally conflicted. At once I am aware that I ought to feel nothing but relief - the situation which has not even been that bad is about to vastly improve (save the disappointing, if minor, side effect of losing my eyebrows and eyelashes), but what I actually feel is a sort of desperation. that I might crack at any moment. that in the face of the anti-climactic shift beyond the chemotherapy halfway point which should be a celebratory moment, all I really want to do is hide in a puddle of blankets and weep. In absence of the sense that I am or could be dying right now it is easy to lose track of why this is happening, why I chose it. Fear of death is too far off to inform my emotional reaction to chemo. Because I'm not dying now. So I'm not afraid of that. The fear that paralyzes me is one that no one can answer to - that this will come back and kill me in a five years, in a decade, at some sad mid-life time. Maybe this medication is stopping that from happening. Maybe it isn't. My sense of purpose wanes. Why these days sick and lonely, this burden to my family and friends, this financial stress? It is difficult to picture the future for which I am fighting when I feel so thoroughly wedged into an overwhelming, painful, present. Harder still when it's the things that future could hold that both give me hope and scare me senseless, so I try not to think much about it.
I can't figure out which is better: to feel this, the middling frustration and mental brittleness, the vague purpose and pervasive loss, or to perpetually remind myself that otherwise I might die from this disease. Which fear is greater? more damaging? more productive? more healing? more real? I wish I knew.
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