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.