I'm Only Human After All

When you have had cancer it is difficult to stop thinking about it. Despite your best efforts to convince yourself that it doesn’t help or change anything it is impossible to control it. Before I finish catching this blog up to date I want to share a journal entry that I wrote back in March, three weeks before I had found out my cancer had returned.  I want to share this because it is raw and real. I think it is hard to know how to support your loved ones once their cancer treatment is over. I never expected to face a depression after I had supposedly beaten the cancer. I want any one reading this to know about the silent pain after cancer so they can know they are not alone. Also so they can help loved ones who may be struggling. I had amazing family support. I would say everyone in my circle was more than supportive and understanding so in my case it was a matter of needing to admit that I was depressed, forgiving myself for that weakness, and then asking for professional help. I was sitting in my English class finding it especially difficult to concentrate that day. This is what I wrote.

It’s Hot. I kick off the blankets which makes my poor husband stir. I am always hot at night now, sticky and sweating. “Stupid hormone treatments. Stupid cancer.” Hot flashes are a Bitch. When you are sitting in public, red hot and melting no one actually thinks that this 29 year old woman might be having a hot flash. Hot flashes are just one of the many leftover reminders of my cancer.

From the start of my diagnosis I have had a gut feeling that my cancer would come back. Maybe it was because I lost a good friend to Breast cancer one month after my diagnosis.(There is a side entry about my friend but I will leave that for another day.) But whatever the reason I have treated this feeling as a mental weakness as if I am letting the cancer kill me because I am not strong enough to rise above this belief and fight. But I did fight. I fought with everything I had. On the surface I appeared to be a heroine.  I tried not to complain, I continued to work. I told everyone I was going to kick cancer’s ass. And I did. Now I look at my mosaic of scars as I stand naked in front of the mirror, everyday a reminder that cancer took something away from me.

 On April 15^th it will be two years. To you it is the day you turn in your taxes. To me it is the day I was told I was cancer free. That is what they tell you anyway. But I swear I can feel it still inside me. Microscopic cells vacationing in other parts of my body just waiting for me to relax and finally believe that I won, to then replicate and invade my happiness.

My cancer was facilitated by a gene mutation. This means there is a 50% chance that I passed this gene mutation on to my daughter. My mom had cancer, my sister had cancer and I had cancer. This causes tremendous guilt knowing that there is a 50% chance that I gave my daughter a cancer causing gene.

There is a depression that has clouded my existence since my cancer free day. In many ways I have moved on with my life. I went back to school to further my education. I want to show my daughter that you have to work hard for the things we want. I continue to socialize to the same degree I did before, although I feel slightly less connected than I did before. Not because they have changed but because I have changed. I try to be a good wife, a good mother, and a good friend. Yet, I continue to believe that my cancer will come back. What good does this serve me? Regardless of the outcome I can’t change it. So why am I wasting my energy worrying about it? I think that maybe this belief is a self protective feeling. If I continue to believe that my cancer will come back I might not be as devastated if it actually does come back.  It is as if I am actually scared to be healthy. Like if I finally relax and let my guard down, that is when everything will come crashing down. But this continued fear means that I am not fully living my life. My daughter and my husband deserve more than this! After all, they fought this battle with me. They are the hero’s in my story. When you talk about love stories, mine is one that would go down in the history books. Pure, unfaltering, crazy, mad love. This doesn’t mean that we are blind to each other’s short comings, but we have a connection that is unbreakable and beautiful and our amazing daughter only made that love blossom and grow stronger. I need to live for them. I need to let go of this fear and this pain for us.

Class ended and I didn’t ever write any more to this entry. But being able to write out these feelings, feelings that I wanted to deny was powerful for me. I hope to learn how to honor my emotions without ignoring them or drowning in them. I think cancer is a very traumatic experience but people don’t expect to have to recover from anything but the physical parts of the disease.  We expect people to take time to heal when they experience a violent crime, or the loss of a loved one, any number of hardships that life deals out. I would just like people to know that cancer is difficult to heal from. This doesn’t make you weak, this doesn’t make you abnormal. It makes you human.

Wishing for Normality

The terror was justified. The scan showed that the cancer had most definitely returned. It was in many bones and one spot showed on my liver. As an act of protocol we did a liver biopsy to make sure it was in fact the same cancer; which of course is exactly what the test showed.  This all came two weeks before finals at school. Up to this point I had maintained a 4.0 and finishing these two weeks meant getting my AS. I couldn’t have been more pissed about the timing but I tried the best I could under the circumstances and managed to keep my 4.0. Once school was done we were back in decisions mode. We always knew at some point that we needed to remove my ovaries but we originally wanted to wait until I was done with my hormone treatments so we could make a less emotionally charged decision as to whether or not we wanted to have one more child first. Now my option was to have them removed or get a shot once a month for the rest of my life to shut them down. The obnoxious result of menopause was the same either way. We opted to have the surgery. That was done in early summer of this year. I also started a hormone treatment that would block all estrogen in my body, in essence trying to starve the cancer of its favorite food.  This showed to be working amazingly well. So I attempted to have a normal summer. This was easier said than done. For one thing through all of this my arthritis was still not being controlled with any of the different medicines we tried but now we were compounding it with the fact that I had zilch in the estrogen department. Estrogen helps coat the joints and many women get arthritis after they hit menopause but it is slow and progressive because menopause is slow and progressive. When you take away a woman’s estrogen over night another type of arthritis can occur which is not controlled with the types of medicines used for my original form of arthritis. But taking away my estrogen meant more than just an increase in arthritis pain; it meant learning how to be patient again. Something I never felt was too hard for me before.  It also messes with your brain. You say stupid things when you would have bit your tongue before. You do stupid things like spraying your aerosol hairspray in the bathroom at the same time your husband is putting in his contacts.  You forget word the second before you are about to say them. You feel more scattered than you have ever felt in your life, like you can’t get organized to save your life. And you become clumsy. I am constantly running into things, dropping things, forgetting things, forgetting conversations. And then there are the hot flashes. I was having them before because of the original hormone treatments that I was on but menopause has kicked them in to high gear. And I am not sure why it is called a hot flash many of mine last hours. It is hard to have a normal summer when you feel more disconnected from yourself than you have ever felt before.  To top it all off the same month we found out my cancer returned one of Chris’ (My Husband) co-workers switch positions and it took them until now to replace her. This has meant that Chris has been working a minimum of 15hrs of overtime per week w/many weeks adding up to much more then that ever since April and is predicted to continue till the beginning of next year when the new replacement should be trained.  Nothing about this year has been normal.