Oh the headspace today is roooooooouuuuuuuugh. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to do. The sludge is thick.
*Post 997
February :: 12/23/17 :: Post 116
Just saw a commercial for the Winter Olympics…. They start on February 8. It’s one of my favorite things and I have wonderful memories of watching the Olympics with my parents growing up. But when I saw the commercial, the first thing I thought was “chemo will be over”……..And my hair will get to start growing back. And my stomach and GI tract can start healing. And my sense of taste will start to come back to normal. And I will be looking at the next page of this chapter.
Chris said something today – “we are less than a month away from being done with the worst chemo.” By this day in January, I will have Round 6 infusion day behind me. Thank God. Get me to February. Get me to the next page.
Normally I don’t want time to pass too quickly….but I’m totally ok with the rest of December and all of January to come and go and become more and more of a memory rather than a current reality.
Family :: 12/23/18 :: Post 467
When family are friends and time with them is relaxing…… 🙂 It does a weary soul, good. Even if I’m still weary. And two more days of family to come. Merry almost Christmas.
Living Changed Head to Toe Day 23 :: 12/23/19 :: Post 831
There are few words to truly do justice to the evil that is cancer. People fear it and pray they never ever hear the words. And if one does have to hear the words, the fears become realities and those realities are much worse than any imagination can ever dream up. If ‘beaten,’ the cancer monster doesn’t actually go away, it looms and its impacts rear their ugly heads out of nowhere…1 year, 10 years, 30 years later. It is truly like a 7 headed monster that cannot ever really be defeated…when one head is cut off, another attacks…and sometimes the head that was severed grows back. I don’t feel like I will ever be free of this looming 7-headed monster even if at the present I am “no evidence of disease.”
Cancer took my hair. My eyebrows. My eyelashes. My nose hairs. It took my boobs and nerves and sensations. It took a healthy immune system and pissed it off so that now it’s attacking itself. It also took my uterus and ovaries and almost every last drop of hormones. The body parts that grew life and love and intimacy – gone. Yes, I don’t have a chance for cancer in body parts that don’t exist but the collateral damage is devastating. Try having a love-life with literally nothing to work with. I know, I know…they say there are options…but the reality still remains the same.
The incredible challenge in it all was having to face the decisions of ‘just take ‘em’ (referring to boobs, uterus and ovaries) and ‘I still need and want them’… Just take ‘em because I don’t want cancer but I need and want them so that my body works. I even was going to choose an ELECTIVE total hysterectomy and oophorectomy to prevent future cancers…until my OB freaked out and sent me to a gynecological oncologist because she was afraid cancer had already made our decision for us.
Ugh cancer. Battling you was brutal. Surviving you is a whole other dimension of brutal.
Living changed, head to toe, day 23 – I have to learn how to navigate a body that is not only significantly different on the outside, but I have to try and figure out how to make sense of the mess cancer made on the inside…even to the most miniscule level. Hair grows back. Nerves might. But I cannot go back to the lab and get my boobs and uterus and ovaries and tell them to put them back….