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.