numbers, useful and less so

February was brutal. I'm sure you noticed. Perhaps you, too, lost your ability to feel wonder or awe and stared out of poorly sealed windows trying to remember what it felt like to be hot, struggled to get up in the morning, and couldn't seem to tap into the motivation to do anything that needed to be done.
I got through the first anniversary of finishing chemo with relative ease, though one year closer to the end of predictive, comforting data, the aspiration to get back to the place and time where we were fighting the disease with a full arsenal weighed heavy in my mind. And it seems I was looking at it all wrong.
I think I'm learning to let go.
Those numbers, as much as I have tried to make of them, as tightly as I have clung to them, and as useful as they were for getting me through the decisions about adjuvant therapy, mean so much less than I'd like them to. I needed to be reminded of that. These numbers don't mean that I won't get cancer within the next nine years; they mean that I probably won't get cancer in the next nine years. There is no perfectly safe zone. I'd slipped into a pattern of quite unscientific thinking, and it failed. I have so much less control and less information than I'd hoped, and this, somehow, is so much easier to manage. If I can never know, then I can stop obsessing about cancer waiting for me out in the shadowy alleys of my future because it may be one block or one hundred miles away and I just don't get to know. What, in the face of such unpredictability, is the point of gripping so tightly to threads that cannot support my intense, inaccurate hope? Uncertainty has disarmed me, and I am so very relieved.
I have a new oncologist whom I like very much. She is at once terribly positive and fantastically practical, which I find very comforting in a doctor. I am sure my feelings toward her are in no small part due to the news she shared with me: while I will still be on Tamoxifen for ten years in total, I can take a break as soon as two years from now to have a baby. Just two beautifully short years lie between now and trying to conceive (naturally! She doesn't even want me to use the embryos yet), instead of the four I had anticipated. This news feels like a fragile little thing, as though it might be taken from me if I celebrate it too loudly, so consider this a quiet declaration, the very happiest of quiet declarations.