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.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, September 6, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
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.
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.
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