Oh the things that trigger me….. just like grief smacks into me when I’m not expecting it, so does the trauma trigger.
I was meeting a new doctor today. That trigger was an expected one because to be vulnerable with a doctor just gets me, but what I didn’t see coming was the point in which I cried during the appointment. You would think it was when I was describing my history. Life before cancer. Life since. My glory days. My survivorship days. My physical health and strength then. My soulful health and strength now. Diagnosis. Surgeries. Treatment. Recon. Symptoms…the long long l o n g list of symptoms. You’d think that part would have been full of messy tears…and while it was emotional, what showed up instead was a sharp edge. Chippy-ness. Anger. All the things protecting me from the pain of vulnerability.
Then she started educating me on what she was seeing in my story. What direction she was going to take with next steps. And she mentioned potential treatments up ahead.
It was there.
Messy tears.
Deep emotion.
High anxiety.
The pit in my stomach.
The throbbing in my head.
The thumping in my heart.
No. no no no. I don’t want drugs. I don’t want to have to live a quality of life chained to pharma. Because what comes with that for me, are all of the side effects. All. A L L. What is better? What decision do I make? Why must it come down to that? Ugh.
As I sit here tonight, hours and hours later, I take a deep breath and remind myself to not write the end of that story yet. I don’t know enough. Neither does she. Nonetheless, the trigger smacked me. Hard. And despite the reason that has brought some calm, the sharp emotions linger.
Two :: June 11, 2018
2 weeks. And that is about all I have to write tonight.
Feelings. Thinkings. :: June 11, 2019
Feeling the feelings? Or just thinking I’m feeling the feelings?
The dullness of emotional exhaustion and med-induced low-mood is weird. I feel emotional and I am able to cry and laugh and feel stress and find peace and experience joy and sorrow in addition to seeking new learnings and applications of purpose and connection…. but there is also this strange dullness to everything.
It’s so hard to describe.
I guess part of me wonders if I THINK I’m feeling these things…like they are in my head because I know how these feelings feel but in reality, I’m not actually FEELING anything because of the dullness of being purely exhausted and low because of anastrozole?
Hmm.
How sad it would be if I was just thinking about how I feel rather than actually feeling what I feel. Yet another thing that cancer is robbing me of, if of course, this were to be true?
No post for 6/11/20