Cancer treatment is “over” and I’m on my way back to the real world. Ready to “get back” to my life.

“Get back to normal.” A laughable phrase. It’s hard to think of a time before 2020 when that was a thing that people said.

I was officially “done” with cancer treatment when my bilateral mastectomy showed no evidence of disease. When I was diagnosed with stage two triple negative breast cancer I dreamed of this day. The day when I could finally put the horror of cancer and consuming grind of chemotherapy injections behind me. I imagined feeling liberated with a giant smile on my face framed by my soft wavy hair, and out getting celebratory drinks with my friends.

The day came, but much of my soft wavy hair had fallen out and a few sparse strands remained. My skin was irritated and splotchy from the chemicals that ran through my veins for six months, broken out from the rise of pregnancy hormones, crash of chemically induced menopause, and the subsequent attempt of my shocked reproductive system’s attempt to re-start itself after the melé. My eyelashes had fallen out, leaving white and red irritated skin in their absence, and my eyebrows had long since thinned, leaving the small tattooed lines where they once grew in abundance. My breasts, which had throbbed full of milk for my baby on the day of my first and last mammogram, had been amputated. Scars from procedures that had been explained to me as “not a big deal” peppered my young body.

The smile I had imagined quivered with an deep and unyielding uncertainty. It was as if I had blacked out for six months between the day I heard the gut wrenching words, “you have cancer,” and the moment when I had been allegedly freed of it. The shock and trauma of the diagnosis was still just as painful and raw as the site of my mastectomy, that sprouted fresh surgical drains.

Of course, there was no celebratory bar crawl because of covid-19. I was alienated from nearly everyone I had ever known due to the unadulterated torture I experienced, but now I had also become alienated even from fellow cancer patients and cancer organizations as I emerged from treatment in a global pandemic.

I walked through places woven with the intimacy of my childhood and young life and talked to people who loved me, but the comfort I used to find in familiarity was dulled. The weight of the experience wore weary on my soul and inflicted upon me an unwelcome lens with which to view the world.

Like an astronaut re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the view from the ground will never be the same. I have been to a place. Not as brilliant or exquisite as the moon. A place where truly no one dreams of taking a step. Where one would prefer not to take a “giant leap for mankind.” If science was to learn from my experience it would not be considered “good”, it would mean I had become a casualty of the lesson.

I have viewed life on Earth from the gates of hell. Despite the fanfare that accompanied my return, I had become an alien in my own life.

With active treatment behind me, I find myself in a space where I don’t identify with anyone. Compared to other people who went through treatment around the same time that I did, I look pretty good. I have lot of hair. My surgery was successful. My results are great (fingers eternally crossed.) But compared to the life of a person in their 30’s, compared to the year I planned for my kids, compared to the first year a baby is supposed to have with her mother, my circumstances are pretty messed up.

“No turning back.” I spoke softly to myself as I packed up all of my last baby’s newborn clothes to give to a friend. I folded and each tiny Christmas dress as I did when I packed my suitcase for Disney last year, this time to give away along with the hopes they once carried in my heart.

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” I repeat to myself when I see another young mother cradling her infant. I clench my jaw to keep the heat of the rising pain from escaping beyond the lump in my throat.

“Their story is not your story,” survivors chant to each other when we hear of another cancer patient whose treatment outcome was outplayed by the fickle disease.

“Life is full of disappointments.” This. Of all the mantras that have been pitched to me by cancer muggles, this is the only one that makes any sense to me now.

From the time I was a child, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I had been indoctrinated with a capitalist outlook for my own life. If I worked hard enough, was smart enough, thin enough, dressed well enough, a good enough mother, then my life should be the reward of the sum of the inputs of my effort.

But we all know that this is a false premise. Children die of cancer. Babies die of SIDS. Mothers die in childbirth. One of the harshest realities to face as humans is the simple fact that bad things happen to good people.

Fresh off of the imminent taste of death, recovering from bodily (and hair) trauma, and fearing relapse, vulnerable cancer survivors are targeted victims of books and advertising campaigns with people and corporations seeking to profit from our fears. We are bombarded with “advice” and poorly researched Facebook posts on how to prevent cancer from happening again. Despite the fact that no one can begin to explain the how or why of our cancer in the first place, an awful lot of people seem to be hocking “advice” on how to prevent recurrence: “EXERCISE 30 MINUTES DAILY, DRINK CELERY JUICE, CHANGE BEAUTY PRODUCTS, AVOID PROCESSED MEATS, DON’T MICROWAVE IN PLASTIC, EAT BROCCOLI, AVOID SUGAR, REDUCE ALCOHOL,” and the hilarious addition to our mountain of trauma and hurricane of spinning thoughts, “AVOID STRESS.”

As if we did not already have enough emotional baggage, now we carry the weight of the urge to change our lifestyles so we don’t cause our own deaths. Because if cancer does come back, it’s surely because we did something wrong and failed the capitalist outlook on personal health, and not because cancer, despite millennia of research, is still largely a mystery to medical science.

My post treatment life is the intersection of three circles of a Venn diagram I could never have predicted: postpartum cancer trauma, garden variety cancer/chemotherapy/surgery/body image trauma, and global pandemic. I was warned about the difficulty of cancer survivorship, but not prepared to face it where everyone had become preoccupied with debating how to handle the minutia of mask wearing.

It doesn’t help that my older children are school age. In the era of covid-19 the merits of our local school district’s “back to school” policies are debated as if they were the Marshall Plan for rebuilding post-war Europe. I can’t decide if I am exhausted with the inability of adults to stomach a relatively small dose of bad luck compared to the tango I have done with my mortality this year, if I am so weary of the stress that I pretend it doesn’t exist, or I am just enraged with people who complain while they have so much hair. Probably all three.

Life is full of disappointments.

Letting go of the belief that I can somehow control the outcome of my life is contrary to everything I have been raised to believe as an American. Work plus “good”ness was supposed to equal success. Once this fundamental premise of external worth is exposed as fraudulent, what remains? If cancer is not the ultimate cause of my death and I live a full and long life, how do I spend the next 35 years continuing to bill the almighty hour knowing it could all come to an abrupt end no matter how much effort I put in?

As survivors, we return to our “old lives” with a new perspective. Stripped of dignity and suffering from trauma, we are expected to “be fine” once we look relatively decent again. “So, you’re cancer free?” folks are eager to put the grim talk of cancer in the past. Fearful that we could awaken a rouge malignant cell, we decline to let these words cross our lips.

Cancer free perhaps, but never free of cancer.