The In Between
Thank you to everyone who reached out to me in some way since my diagnosis. I was touched by how many people, from various and far back times in my life, took the time to let me know how much they care. I truly appreciate and remember each and every person who wrote or called, even if I didn’t respond yet. Sometimes I don’t have the emotional space for conversations about cancer and sometimes I don’t have the emotional space for conversations at all.
I intend to keep writing.
It’s more than catharsis. Upon my initial diagnosis, I scoured the Internet to find someone “like me” who had been through breast cancer. Plenty of folks have told me about an eighty year old family member who “battled breast cancer,” or worse, died of cancer, (um, I can do without those!) but that isn’t me. I’m a young, working mother of three who discovered the lump during pregnancy. And so, my experience, added to those who came before me, is here to be learned from.
Every year I take off time between Christmas and the New Year. Once my kids started grade school I allowed myself the luxury of extending this until the public school calendar resumed after the turn of the year. I have always loved this time but I always dread it’s end. It’s such a magic time to relax and enjoy each other while ignoring the stresses of regular life until January.
This year, the time was filled with medical appointments. Arriving at the hospital to run from blood draws to radiology to oncology. The trepidation of January’s impending arrival sits on my chest like a giant boulder. I find myself gasping for air from time to time as if I now lived my life under water.
January means we all head back to real life. To school, to work, to the daily grind and for me, to somehow fit cancer treatment into this.
And the dread that I feel for chemotherapy is consuming.
Cancer robbed my of my ability to think that “everything will be okay” and by all accounts chemo will rob me if everything that makes me feel like myself. My physical health. My hair. The strength of my heart. My hair. My immune system. My hair. My ability to fire back witty comments. My hair.
And my hair goddamit.
Discovering all of the little things that chemotherapy will change about my long term health is frightening. It angers me. I have taken excellent care of my body. I have exercised my entire adult life. Two decades of running! I have eaten loads of salads and raw vegetables, low fat proteins, and I cut down on sugar long before it was trendy. Now I’ll have to worry about osteoporosis, neuropathy, my heart, my kidneys, and a handful of other issues that usually plague the elderly. I had a baby just a handful of weeks ago but this week I’ll have a shot that will put me into menopause.
I don’t even know if my mom is in menopause yet but it’s definitely not something I put on my “to do” list two months post partum.
Everyone who has been through cancer tells me that the time between diagnosis and treatment is the worst part. I lack the perspective to determine what the worst part is yet, but I certainly hope this is it. Between the fear of the disease and the fear of the treatment, it’s a pretty terrifying mental place.
People are quick to point out that I’m lucky this is treatable. I agree. This is some bad shit, but I am acutely aware of how many other “worse” types of cancer exist. But “lucky” doesn’t seem to fit the bill here. Especially when the folks telling me how “lucky” I am don’t have fucking cancer.
Maybe I’ll feel a little more lucky when I’ve completed chemo, but for now I’m still pretty scared. And pissed off.
On my 38th birthday, I threw a wine glass at the wall just to see it explode. Broken glass and red wine dusted the wall and floor boards. Terry, who had used every comforting phrase he could think of in the last ten days was silent. My rage remained unquenched. The leftover candles from my birthday cake laid on a napkin and blurred from the tears in my eyes.
Cancer was not what I wanted to do at 38.
I watched Terry pick up pieces of glass and wondered how we would manage to pick up the pieces of our life.
Everyone tells me I need to “fight.” As if cancer was a boxing match and I just need to hold it together for a few bruising rounds.
Many who have had the unfortunate experience of being on the other side of an argument from me can attest to the fact that fighting is something I do well. If cancer could be beaten with words, this brief detour into hell would already be a distant memory.
Words, my weapon of choice, are no use to me here. Fighting will be in the mundane details: going to work when I am exhausted and run down from treatment, taking care is my fingernails so they don’t fall off, accepting the uncomfortable port in my chest for access to my central line, finding a way to smile through the nausea when my kids need their mother, and dragging myself to successive treatments that make me feel like a science experiment and strip me of my humanity.
Fighting like this makes me wonder what version of myself will be left. I plan on standing at the end of all of this but what bruises inflicted by cancer will really be scars? Scars on my body and scars on my soul.
The time and space in between will end. The treatment will begin. The change has crept into our lives, unwelcome, unyielding, and undeniable. A new year, indeed.
A big year for Penny Lane and for Mommy
