more hard parts

I couldn't have picked more perfectly uncomfortable radio program topics if I'd been sitting at a table writing this morning with a team of gifted screenwriters instead of living it. As it happens, I was living it and not writing it, though I wish it could have been the other way around.
On the way to my mother's appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, Diane Rhem interviewed two men about the new pope's views on abortion and family planning and poverty. We drove in silence, each pretending to ignore the broadcast, each pretending that she wasn't judging me and that I, in turn, wasn't angry with her for that judgement. As if she has any idea of what it was like...
She spent the hour or so at the doctor's office being impossibly chipper, cracking jokes and insisting that I could leave if I wanted to. I maintained civility. I'm not ready to be her friend yet, not without some sort of coming to terms with the past year and half.
We waited at the check out counter. She nervously eyed an elderly couple, leaned toward me and whispered loudly, "I don't want to get old."
"I don't know what to tell you." All I could think was how much I hope that I can get old, and how old she is in spite of her age.
At our next stop, she lost patience with my inability to play at being friends and yelled at me as I tried to help her into the store.
She came out--stubbornly pulling herself along with one functional foot, three bottles of wine in plastic bags on her lap, crutches held awkwardly at her side--and ignored me when I tried to help her into the car.
On our way back to the apartment, Terry Gross interviewed the makers of a new television series about adults with elderly parents receiving palliative care. They talked about the burden and the privilege of being there for the awful time our loved ones spend in the hospital. about being advocates and caretakers. about love.
And while she stared out the window brooding, I snapped.
I told her that she didn't get to punish me for having a hard time with this. I reminded her that she had lied to me and said she was dying, that she had been vicious while I was sick and scared for my life, that she had concocted strange stories about me and Jason as though I might somehow come to believe a fiction about my own actions. "But I'm here," I said, "taking you where you need to go and walking your dogs, and I'll keep doing it, but you do not get to demand that I not feel what I'm feeling." She turned back to the window, silent. I cried.
Wordlessly, she refused my help out of the car or up the stairs where she slammed the door in my face.
It's hard to know what to do next, if anything.
Cue Lynn Rosetto Kasper's explanation of the best holiday recipes for eating away your guilt and sorrow.


 

bright spots and dark spots

I haven't used the space to write about my mother. I think because, on some level, her big-brotheresque stories about being able to constantly monitor me still linger in the back of my mind and I think she'll find it. I don't think I've got any readers who don't know me, and if you know me, you probably know that she and I have a horrible relationship. You probably also know that we haven't actually spoken to each other in over a hear. I use that term, "speaking," fairly liberally, because since I told her that I wouldn't talk to her until she stopped screaming at me (for not appropriately assuaging her fears that I might die while I was dealing with my diagnosis and subsequent surgery and adjuvant therapy planning), she hasn't actually spoken words to me, but has screamed via text message about how she's dying (not true) and how I am a terrible person for abandoning her.
Sometimes I think she's right. Most of the time I appreciate the quiet weeks in between the texts.
She is not well. I know that. But I couldn't keep letting that be my primary concern in life once I ran into something so large that it took all of my focus and strength. I needed to take care of myself before I could take care of her.
A week ago she broke her ankle.
I picked her up from the hospital and took her home and have been stopping by every day to walk her dogs.
It's awful.
At first she was terse, resentful of needing my help, I'm sure. She's moved on to pretending that nothing is wrong, ignoring me or playing dumb or tossing out trump cards when I indicate that I, too, know what it's like to be incapacitated by surgery. To feel frustrated and gloomy and scared. To be in pain that seems like it might never end. To be dependent.
She wasn't there for me in those days. Indeed, two days after getting home from two surgeries and a week in the hospital, she picked a fight with me that led to the ensuing year and half of (relative) silence. 
So she pretends that those days never existed, or that if they did, I am just melodramatic, exaggerating for pity, which lets her be the bigger victim.
And I keep going over there. Keep biting my tongue. Keep not screaming at her for accusing me of shaving my head after finishing chemo to garner more sympathy. And not confronting her about how she lied and told me she had lung cancer, or about how she tried to make me think that Jason was cheating on me.
And I spend a little part of each day feeling like I might explode. And I don't know what to do.
I keep thinking that there ought to be a point when shit stops piling up. I can't be the case that all of my life will be this perpetual onslaught of disasters, right? But it doesn't ever seem to stop and I'm just so fucking tired.
I suppose in these dark moments, it is easy to overlook the bright ones that come in between, and there certainly are bright spots.

sweet relief

This thing I've been waiting for for over a year finally happened. It happened and I didn't even notice, but I suppose that's exactly how monumental events of this variety ought to happen.
I went the entire day--from the time I got up and get dressed, through my work day of moving around and crouching and huddling with students over their writing, of putting on taking off my jacket, until I got home and had made dinner--without thinking about my breasts. At no point did I have to try to discretely adjust my prosthesis, pull my scarf lower, my sweater tighter, or my collar higher to hide the awkward, abrupt protrusion that housed the hard, bulbous tissue expander. When I used the bathroom I didn't bother looking at my chest to see if the prosthesis was lopsided or if my bra was fitted weirdly over the expander (where I lack sensation). No stretch was interrupted with the genuine fear that I'd disordered my cumbersome, temporary breasts. The expander didn't push into my bicep, nudging uncomfortably to remind me of its presence.
I just got up and went to work and did regular people things, and thought about regular people things, without being distracted by feeling like a very irregular person. I haven't done that in a very long time.

surgery

Yesterday I had a surgery. The awkward, hard tissue expander that had been in place for months was removed in replaced with a much more breast-like implant.

The tissue expander was an odd, plastic pouch inserted under the muscle at my mastectomy site, slowly inflated by shots into the hard port. It crinkled and made a hollow sound with a strange rippling reverberation against my ribs when I bumped it . As it grew, it was stretched to beyond the size of my natural breast, expanding in an unnatural, somewhat cylindrical protrusion on my chest. It stuck out a bit past my rib cage so that every time I loved my arm, I brushed against it. It was difficult to dress, in its last expansion phase necessitating that I wear my prosthetic breast over top of my natural breast to compensate for the extreme size difference.

Now it is gone, and in its wake is a body that will soon feel much more normal, much less like a construction site, easier to dress, comfortable.

This is an important part of my new normal.

staying, from this end

I've had a lot of people remind me, as though left to my own devices I'd forget, that I'm lucky to have Jason. I know it, and I say it a lot, too. He's good support. He makes me laugh. He makes me feel smart and important. But that's not what they mean, and sometimes it's not what I mean either.

What we all collectively mean, at least sometimes, when we say this is that I'm lucky that he stayed.

I don't know that he even knows the extent of it, but doctors and nurses asked regularly how he was coping and how his coping was affecting me. They were always relieved to hear that I wasn't afraid he'd leave, which is so heartbreaking. Even the women who fitted me for my prosthesis kept reminding me that my husband was going to be so happy. They were wrong about that. He wasn't the one who cared.

It does not say good things about what we expect from men that so many people approach his having stayed with such gratitude and surprise. It insults Jason. It indicates that abandonment is a common experience for a lot of women, so say the nurses, doctors, and prosthesis fitters, most common for women with breast cancer.

On another level, it does terrible things to me. Because I already fell apart about what a burden it was. Because on some level I do not believe that I'm worth the trouble. Because there were times when I wished he would leave me so that he could have the sort of life I wanted him to have. The one he wanted. The one we planned. Because I sat sobbing more times than I can count, cursing the fact that the insurance came through his job, because if it didn't I could have just left, given that he showed no signs of being willing to pick a different life for himself. Because if we all think it's remarkable that he stuck by me, then don't we all think, just a little, that he would have preferred not to? Because if we think that, then aren't we all agreeing that I'm really not worth the trouble?

Because I already feel so fucking lucky and indebted that I'm struggling to consider myself his equal.

So I'm glad that my family is completely head over heels for him. And I'm glad that the people who ask have a positive story to file alongside their collection of bad ones: The Good Man Who Stayed. And I'm glad that on some level I know that he was never going anywhere. What I don't always know is why it was worth staying. But I don't think I can handle another reminder of how lucky I am. But I could take a few that this--that staying--was exactly what we all thought would happen. That it is worthwhile. Because that's the thing I still struggle to believe.

reminders

I knew when I accepted a job at a parochial school that there would be many challenges; as a non-religious person, just this new proximity to people and their faith was foreign territory.
The first time I sat through mass, blood boiling over the hypocrisy of people who would claim to love and forgo judgement praying to their god that others be denied the right to marry, I knew that this promised to be tough in ways I hadn't anticipated.
And then I found myself sitting opposite a slight, plain-faced seventeen-year-old girl and wishing her infertile. I didn't keep wishing it, but for a minute I sent mental daggers and my own meaningless prayer into the universe that experience might teach her what I know that she does not.
She was explaining to me that when she becomes a doctor, she intends to be an activist of sorts, one that does her utmost to halt the twin scourges of abortion and in vitro fertilization. This was how I learned that the Catholic church preaches against the use of in vitro fertilization.
But you have no idea, you are just a child.
I wanted to explain to her that until she has sat on the crumpling paper of an examination table listening to an oncologist tell her that disease makes pregnancy risky and treatment may make it impossible, she cannot possibly write off medial procedures--let alone seek to make them unavailable--for people in circumstances she cannot possibly understand. There is just so very much she does not know.
She wanted me to help her with a college entrance essay, and I did, though my blood seethed thinking of the ways this girl would judge me if she knew anything at all about my life. I bit my tongue carefully, talked about writing conventions.

I work in a place where judgement comes easily, slipping off the tongues of coworkers without a second thought. It is difficult to get through a day without feeling casually judged or picking up little reminders that I am not playing by the right set of rules dropped carelessly by so many of my coworkers.
But generally, my classroom is a little haven of tough questions and good books, of patience and love, a place where value judgements are addressed firmly, with efficiency and sincerity. I suppose that's why it felt like such an affront when this girl attacked something so intensely personal and dear to me.
I don't let them do that to each other; it hadn't occurred to me that I might, however inadvertently, be the target.

memory

When things keep happening, as things are wont to do, it gets easy to fall in line with a routine that then makes it easy to sink into feeling like life has always been this way. Like there was never cancer to contend with. Like I don't still fear for my life. Like it all transpired in a life that belongs to someone else.
It didn't, though. It happened right here in this living room, this house, this town. This body. And you were there for it, you remember.
I just have such trouble fitting the whole experience into my sense of my own life. Square peg, round hole. And so it is that I generally set about my days like any other person, only sometimes I want to stop and scream, DID YOU KNOW I HAD CANCER?! BECAUSE I DID AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME AND SOMETIMES I'M STILL VERY, VERY SCARED.
But usually I'm not. Usually, I feel just like anyone else. Until these memories slam into me, tiny flashes of my own face in the mirror as I fasten a scarf around my baldness. My own finger nails, sore and brittle, peeling away from the tips of my fingers. The darkness that pervaded days when I lay sick and inactive. An image of my own feet, pacing in circles while I wait for a doctor or insurance agent on the phone.
I'm still looking for the places where all of these pegs fit. And trying hard to convince myself that I'm really making the space they need, instead of just wishing I could forget them all.
Which is really the contradictory kicker, because on one hand I want so badly to pretend it never happened, and on the other I am so scared that already there are things I've forgotten.

back at it

Hello my few abandoned readers. A lot has happened since I last made an entry here. I have a full-time teaching job. Oddly, this job is at a tiny parochial high school and two weeks in I am certain that I stick out like a horribly liberal sore thumb that just cannot be fitted to the conservative confines of this school. I don't think I'll get fired, but it looms as a more-real possibility than it has at any other job I've ever worked.
The job has its rewards. And its serious trials.
I am nearing the end of the reconstructive surgery process. My chest is now home to a strange contraption that stretches my muscle and skin, preparing them to eventually house the implant that will take the place of my long-gone cancerous breast.
I got my first post-chemo haircut last week. Just a trim, really, but it was satisfying to need that trim, and to put myself in the books for another cut now that the presence of hair on my head is a certainty.
Generally, things are good.
Still, reminders pop up that life keeps being hard in myriad ways.
Someone that you do not know whom I love very much tried to end his life a few weeks ago. He did not succeed, but survives with brain damage that is likely to leave him permanently dependent.
I talked to his mother tonight. We talked about bravery and about saying sentences you never thought you'd have to say. We talked about postponing the saying of said sentences because maybe, just maybe, we could hold out long enough and eventually they wouldn't be true.
But they are.
Her son has brain damage.
And she is brave. She is brave because she didn't cave in under the immeasurable weight of this disaster. Because she finds positivity to propel her through each day. But then--as she said, and as I said when people told me I was brave--what other option do we have? The irony of asking this question in light of this situation does not escape us. Still, it doesn't feel like bravery to keep going.
But I want to tell her that she is brave and strong and full of love and that these are admirable and important qualities. I want her to know that about herself.
And I want for her to have some reprieve from the people around her being in perpetually painful situations, some of their own making and others that are just chance. I want it to matter that she has tried to make their lives good. To change the course of events trickling back to and heaping themselves upon her.
It seems like there are people whose lives are not plagued by heartache and disaster. I hear about them, and I think I know a few. But maybe everyone's life is this hard and I am just unaware. I guess I don't believe in whatever metric might be used to gauge one against the other anyway.
This has been a year of many great losses, some good and some bad. Moving on keeps happening, regardless of how actively I participate. Maybe coming back here is a way to be an agent in the process. 

new work

When I was 23, I was driving home one night from one of many grueling conversations with an ex who was determined not to let our relationship end. A drunk driver blew through a stop sign going at least 45mph down a residential street and struck my car just in front of the driver's side door. The impact flattened the hood of my car and sent me spinning until I finally came to a rest in my black car that now had no headlights facing oncoming traffic. I sincerely wasn't sure I was alive or conscious until I realized that the sound I could hear was no longer my squealing tires, but rather, my own voice screaming. A few people came out of their houses, consoled me on the side of the road, waited for the police, and took note of the direction in which the drunk driver had run away from the scene. 
A day or two later, my mom drove me out to the scrap lot where my car had been towed to collect a few belongings from the car (title, books, etc.). I froze up as soon as we found the car, looking at the twisted heap of metal in the daylight put a new perspective on what I'd walked away from. My mother cried, terrified at the carnage before her. It had been easier in the immediacy of the accident to think of other things, to let shock do its job. And so it was when I walked up to the sliding glass doors and expansive lobby of the University of Michigan Cancer Center.
The drive was easy, light on the traffic and just rushed enough that I was preoccupied with the time, racing to be less late. Frantic, I tapped the steering wheel waiting impatiently for traffic lights to turn, made my up the winding Medical Center Drive and parked near the entrance to the University of Michigan Cancer Center. Six months and three days from the last time I walked into this hospital. Six months, three days, and one hour from when my surgeon came to me to say he wasn't sure he could save the dying tissue on my chest, when I sobbed to nurses and begged them to wait just a little longer so I could at least see Jason before going in for emergency surgery. Six months, three days, and two hours from the moment my surgeon had been pulled from the operating room, abandoning another patient, to evaluate me. Six months was not enough time.
Every step toward the door tightened a vice on my chest, pushed harder and harder on tears eager to burst from their ducts. What a mess. Unconsolable, I steadied my quavering voice as best I could while I answered intake questions. I left my forms at the front desk to try to settle my nerves in the bathroom, only to return for them and jettison myself into the same weepy, shaky state in which I'd entered the medical office.
A nurse practitioner and surgeon each did a physical exam, and arrived at the same verdict: my scars are healing nicely, I am healthy, there is no suspicion of more cancer in my lymph nodes, left breast, or on the chest wall - all clear. Safe, right? But all I could think was that I wanted to leave. My eyes dove for the exit door again and again. I wanted to be away from this place because even in the face of very good news, I cannot seem to associate this building with anything but loss and the agony that was those unsure days after my first surgery, when I sweated and slept in interrupted spurts, when I couldn't eat for days, when I couldn't move or look at my body out of the sheer shock of how I'd been cut apart, when I felt incessantly woozy, itchy, and nauseated from pain killers that seemed to be failing miserably at their job, when I watched my mother crack under the stress of it all.  
When my life was saved.
Why, in the face of all this, is it so hard to remember that all of that was in service of making sure I'm still here on this planet?
I'm realizing more and more that this has all been very traumatic for me, as melodramatic as I feel using that word, and I am reminded of my first oncologist's warning that many patients emerge from treatment with symptoms of trauma. I'm not diagnosing myself as such, but trying to lend validity (for myself) to the way I feel.
I think a lot about all the things I should do now that I know my time on this planet could have been so brief, but I've gained at least a few more years. And then I get so fucking scared about how I might still not be long for this earth and I can't seem to move. I fantasize about travel and making art, about parenting and creating some beautiful thing that announces that I've been through some shit but I came out the other end and I love my very precious life. And then, in the way one's heart will steel itself in advance of known loss, I retreat-just a little-afraid to love my own life, lest I lose it too soon. 
This is my new work- to take this fear and know it, name it, own it, and set aside, to assure myself that it doesn't belong here. Not anymore.

the ups and ons

It's hard to believe I didn't update when I finished chemo, because that felt like a serious milestone, because that was a big milestone. In the mean time there has been some good and some bad that I won't go into here.

I'm starting to not be able to keep up with the blog, so I think I'm going to set it aside for a while (something I've already been doing gradually). I think once spring rolls around and I'm starting reconstructive surgery and there is more consistent sunshine, I'll be better about updating. Right now most of my energy and creativity is sapped by the classroom. I get to this blank page and the thought of filling it with the sort of writing anyone might want to read seems impossible. Currently, I'm working an average of ten hours a day and still doing work on the weekends and still waiting for the last round of chemo meds to run their course - getting back to a normal energy level is a ways off and presently, this job and putting decently healthy dinners on the table is about all I can accomplish. I get to the weekend feeling pretty beat and needing lots of rest. The good thing is that I do rest. The bad thing is that I might be over-working myself, just a little. The positive rationale for doing so is that everyone at my current (temporary) job seems very intent on helping me find a permanent one and I have an interview coming up this Friday.

I don't think I want to write much about my last chemo treatment because I won't give it its due. It was an amazing feeling and a good friend shared the whole day with me, laughing and keeping things positive, and if I write about it now, it'll come off as a list of minor events culminating in the mediocre telling of a major life event. I don't want to do that.

Weird side effect of the chemo that is just starting - my fingernails are separating from the skin beneath them that keeps each one attached to the ends of my fingers. I am unnerved by this process. I'm trying to be gentle with my hands and I'm not prodding at them or anything, but every time I look at my fingers the white tip of my nail has grown, reaching further and further toward the nail bed. I'm not sure how to react. It isn't gross yet, but it seems to be headed that way - the slow progression to a fairly insignificant, but uncomfortable, strange, and socially semi-repugnant end result of being a person in the world with NO FINGERNAILS. ew. Also, how long before they grow back? Will the grow back in a weird way? What does one do to protect that newly unearthed, tender pink flesh where there ought to be nice, hard nails? I have a lot of questions. Which brings me to another thing (sorry to be so disjointed) - perspective. While losing my fingernails might normally seem like a huge ordeal, and it is definitely of concern, I keep thinking I have to remind you as I type that I realize that this is not actually a very big deal. Because it isn't. And because all sorts of things that once seemed like a big deal will probably not ever seem like such a big deal again. Because I've been through chemo, and even that was a much easier round than many people endure. And I'm here. And I'm pretty sure I'm not going anywhere. The purpose behind the chemo is sinking in again. I think I trust it. And I'm ready to keep going.

Thank you, dear few readers. It's meant a lot to me that you have bothered to read my rambling, bumbling, and frequently depressive ranting. For now, I'm going to turn myself over to a different kind of healing, focus on putting together my new normal, reassemble a social life, and adjust to the slow cancer battle - the one that is long-term and about lifestyle and a little daily pill.
Check back in the spring!

much love.

work

I've been staying very busy prepping lesson plans lately. Yep, I'm teaching... another teacher's classes, but I'm grateful for it either way. I sort of forgot how much work it takes to get all the content fresh in my own mind, then figure out what I want/need the kids to learn, then set up a plan for how to get them there. In some ways I make it harder than myself than I really need to. I could spend a lot less time planning if I were content to find videos for them to watch, assigning textbook readings and letting them answer those crap questions at the end of each chapter. I'll be honest, the students will do a little bit of that stuff, but I'm also trying to create activities and build in ways for them to get out of their seats, use their brains for something beyond rote memorization. Doing that for three classes, five days a week is a lot of work. It's good work, and I'm glad to be doing it. This is the sort of job in which I could lose myself, giving all of my free moments and then some over to grading, coming up with ideas for projects and activities, tweaking lectures, looking again and again for the perfect reading. Yesterday I promised Jason that I wouldn't do that this time. I promised that I would set limits on what I will give to this job because the degree to which I have pushed myself in the past has meant giving up a lot: time with Jason, friends, and family; sleep; healthy eating habits; a little bit of sanity.
I like to work. I like to be busy. For months now I've been feeling like I've been doing so little, spinning my professional wheels and contributing minimally to household finances, so teaching -even if they're not my classes for good- feels like a godsend. But, owing to the thankless nature of the profession in general, and the substitute profession in particular, it comes with a few conditions I ought to remember. 1. I'm not getting paid to build these classes from the ground up (even if that's what needs to be done), I am getting paid to fill in for the person who gets paid to build the classes. It's just bad timing that the new semester is starting and she didn't have them all planned out for me. 2. It's ok if everything isn't perfect. 3. This isn't a permanent job. I need a recommendation and to be on someone's radar and I can do that by doing the job very well. 4. I don't need to break myself to do the job very well. 5. I have to be concerned with taking care of myself. I am still healing and even if I mostly feel fine, missing out on rest or creating undue stress are things that will make healing harder.
Everyone keeps telling me that they're sure this will be the thing that leads me to full-time teaching work. I hope they're right. I could use something productive to pour my energy into, and I've been looking for a job for a good long while now. The whole job search process is mighty discouraging. 
The day after tomorrow I will have my last chemotherapy treatment. I wonder how that will feel. Right now I'm feeling a lazy sort of anticipation, I'm glad I'm so close to being done, but I also feel kind of ... blank.

endings

I keep having the strange urge to make an appointment to get a hair cut, as if I had hair to cut. Part of me thinks it would be hilarious to make an appointment only to show up bald, just to see how the stylist would react. What does one say to an apparently delusional chemo patient come to you for services that are impossible to render? I'm curious. I found myself tempted to wander over to the hair dye section of the grocery store, though I can't remember the last time I felt compelled to dye my hair when it was all here. I think I'm just craving the habits of my old body.

Two days ago I had my second-to-last chemo treatment. It felt good, feels good. When I think about how very near I am to the end of this part of the process, I get butterflies. I want to show up to that last appointment dressed to the nines with champagne and noise-makers, confetti and music. I want to run out of there to the triumphant cheers of nurses and other patients, not because I think I deserve it, but because it's the first thing that really feels worth celebrating in about eight months. Ok, the second thing, the first being the removal of the cancer. It's just all been so fucking hard, from the change in my diagnosis to the failed reconstruction to the huge egg harvest that turned out three embryos, precious and heavy with the pressure of one chance and all my hope.
Two weeks from today I will be facing the rest of my life wherein the management of my cancer care is more about lifestyle than regular doctor visits and abrasive medications. The energy these meds have sapped will slowly return. My hair will grow back. I'll have a reason to use my razor again. My bottle of shampoo that has sat, virtually untouched, in the shower will be put to use. The aches that now arise in my bones will dissipate. The pain in my nail beds, the tingling and numbness in my fingertips will (hopefully, probably) subside. I will be able to avoid the smells of the infusion room. Lightly spiced food will no longer set my tongue aflame. I'll have my port removed and the skin on my chest will lay flat once again, rather than stretching and bubbling over this plastic implant.
It's a funny feeling, this coming to the end. Because it feels so momentus, like such a big event, and in so many ways it isn't an ending at all. The cancer center gives patients chemo completion diplomas. On January 30th, I will spend hours in the infusion room and on my way out the door, they'll hand me a sheet of printer paper certifying that I made it. That I stuck it out and got to the end.
But it won't be the end, because they'll also hand me a prescription for Tamoxifen and schedule a follow-up appointment for an mri and a physical exam to monitor for recurrence. And I'll take that Tamoxifen for five years. And I'll go home and schedule appointments with plastic surgeons to find the right doctor to do my reconstruction. And hopefully by mid-summer the reconstruction will be done. Another ending on the horizon.
And I'll take my Tamoxifen every day. And I'll eat well and use the elliptical more. And I'll try even harder to find ways to make myself feel like I'm living instead of waiting.
Because right now, and for the forseeable future, I feel like I'm waiting for the actual end of all of this but it isn't coming for a long, long time, if ever.
I'm having a hard time giving myself over to my future which is riddled with much waiting and all sorts of terrifying things I can't know, and the prospects are scarier now than they were a year ago. A year ago we were thinking babies and vacation and law school and job prospects. Then our life was thrown into upheaval and all those things were scattered to the edges of our field of vision. Now, as the dust begins to settle and the things we wanted have started to move closer to our grasp, it's babies on which I'm fixated. Because that's the thing we can't have (and the thing everyone around us seems to be having), and because for some reason I have it in my head that having a baby is the one thing that will make me feel like I have a normal life again (which is a lot of pressure for a new person and might be precisely why it's best we can't have a baby right now). All sorts of things hold that hope at arm's length - I have five years of hormone therapy to do during which time I am not allowed to get pregnant*; having had cancer renders me an inelligible candidate for many adoption agencies for at least a few years; medical bills and much time off of work has left us financially less stable than we once were, and adoption is expensive. And time-consuming. The whole scenario gets me thinking about myself as defective and that occasionally spirals into guilt about keeping Jason from being able to have the life he wanted. I was only mostly joking when I recently told him that he could easily leave me, marry someone else, and have a kid all well before he and I could even start trying.
Now I'm watching my dear friend's incredible daughter grow and it's a wonderful thing to see. And it fills a selfish part of me with envy. One of the best couples I know is expecting their first child and I'm wildly happy for them. Seeing one of my oldest friends grow an exciting little life in her lovely, round belly is kind of magical. And I want it for myself. I feel guilty; it is a selfish set of emotions that I struggle to control. I have another pregnant friends and I keep meaning to wish them well, check in, and then not doing it because I'm scared of my own emotions, and I'll be honest - I'm jealous of all these wonderful women with their cancer-free bodies, despite my better intentions and my happiness for them. I want to lavish them with gifts and hear about their pregnancies with a desperation that can only be inhabited by those who are unable to participate. I am the mama club outsider, too eager and not allowed to convert to their ranks. What sort of person am I?
This is where I get trapped in all the things I can't know, and how to make myself live this life now instead of waiting around for the things I wanted. I can't know for at least five years whether or not the chemo has made me infertile. That's a big question to just leave hanging around out there. I can't ever know if pregnancy and the associated hormones will flip a tiny cellular switch, making little meals for hungry cancer cells. I can't know whether or not my body even contains those cells. The ground beneath my feet is unsteady. I hate not knowing. I am that terribly nosy, obnoxious conversationalist pestering others to fill me in on what I've missed, unwilling to let Jason keep even the tiniest secret, seeking more details constantly. And here my very own body is full of huge, important secrets and I've the rest of my life (how long is that?) to find out what they are.
Maybe my problem is that I keep thinking that at some point this cancer voyage will come to an end. But it won't. It will progress in fits and starts but it won't end. The end of chemo is the beginning of hormone therapy. The end of hormone therapy is the beginning of trying to make a family, which is rife with its own exciting and frightening potentialities. And through all of this is the continuation of my life, taking care of myself and searching for ways to accept what I don't know, to accept that there isn't really an end to any of this, but that it will get better, to believe that the things I want like a baby and to be able to work full-time without medically necessary interruptions and to be financially stable enough to be elligible adoptive parents and to stop thinking of my life as something that exists between doctors' appointments and treatments are all out there for me. Because all those things are out there... I think.
I suspect that in a couple of weeks these things will feel a little more real, not quite so far out of reach, and over the next few months normality will come back to me in small, modified pieces. And I will relish each morsel.

*Technically, I could interrupt my Tamoxifen regimen to have a baby, but doctors do not advise doing so and they have little to no data on how this impacts the effectiveness of the drug. Also, because it is ill-advised to stop the therapy, they recommend restarting immediately after giving birth which cuts out the possibility of breast feeding. I think if I were to stop taking the drug to try to get pregnant, I'd spend a lot of time scared about how that might impact the rest of my life and as much as I want to shorten the wait, I am more afraid to shorten my life.  

lady parts

Here it is, the thing you all come here - or to almost any blog for that matter - in search of: very personal information about my life! Today's exciting personal information is this: I am having a period! A real-live fest of womanly bleeding, cramps, and lower-back aches! An actual accounting of the functionality of my reproductive system! I understand that this may not seem exciting to the casual observer, or maybe you're one of those folks who has just had it up to the eyeballs with women and their dang periods, but allow me to do a bit of scene-setting.
I haven't had a period, or especially normal physical functions since early October when we went through the whole in vitro process of pumping me up with hormones, harvesting and fertilizing eggs, and freezing the resultant embryos. Shortly thereafter I started chemo which made several things happen. First, it made me tired. Then it made me nauseated. Then it made my hair fall out. It made my skin dry up so that despite drinking LOTS of water, (begrudgingly) taking fewer and cooler showers, and moisturizing like a swamp-dweller transported to Death Valley, I still itch and flake. It makes my bones ache. The aching bones were just a side effect of the growth factor shots, but now are a side effect of both my current infusion drug, Taxol, and the growth factor shots. Ouch. It made my periods stop altogether. And, as if that weren't enough, it gives me hot flashes. Fucking hot flashes at 28 years old! Embarrassing and occasionally hilarious, like the time I was talking to students about travel and mentioned that I did a bit of European back-packing when suddenly a hot flash struck, making me turn BEET RED and SWEATY, which in turn made them very uneasy and very curious. Or the time I had one at a show and two generous men tried to make me feel better by asserting that they were sure they'd experienced the same thing. Sorry dudes, but you have not. I think I appreciate your effort to normalize this unusual phenomenon. Yes, I realize that men occasionally have hot flashes but, as in women, it corresponds to later-in-life changes in hormone levels and these guys were my age.
The only thing any doctors, books, or web forums said about my cycle stopping was that at my age, chances were good that it would return within the next YEAR or TWO, which left me with some serious concerns about the resiliency of my reproductive system, and pretty distressed about what these drugs are doing inside of me. It's strange how important this feels. I used an IUD for years and so had very few and very light menstrual cycles. I didn't anticipate feeling so jilted when the chemo sent me into amenorrhea, but in combination with the loss of so much else that felt normal and feminine, this absence, too, was quite glaring.
Welcome back.