It’s coming.
It’s the CT, PET, or MRI. The acronyms don’t matter as much as the fear, because what if? What if there’s a blip, a lighting up, a growth, a recurrence, an expansion, a concern? And what if there isn’t? What then?
(“Clear,” calls the Emergency Medical Technician before shocking the heart.)
Cancer is an abusive lover. I’ve learned not to celebrate too much when things go well, because the trust in a long-term, healthy future is gone. Even if the scans show nothing, trust in the world has failed. The sure sense in an ongoing future has failed. Planning a year or five years ahead with certainty? Failed. This “lover” – cancer – is always lurking, its revenge always a possibility. It hides its power, it lures you into comfort. It charms you back into living. It leads you back into your body, the ease of each day’s choreographies: movements through the front door, work, friends, gestures here and there, family, food.
Oh hello, hair, hello travel plans — let us begin again. Let us pretend with the ease of the healthy-bodied living that we are ever ongoing, that we will not, in our careful financial records and remodeling plans, ever perish. Tahiti? Paris? A mani-pedi scheduled for Friday. Oh, and the workout.
Scans jolt me out of this trance. There is the word we are all trying so hard to avoid: death. Dying. A finite closure, that the body and mind and this life as we know it will end. Will.
And so, I have a scan today. A CT scan to see if this current treatment of Xeloda and Taxotere are working to shrink this recurrence. If the tumor has shrunk, we continue, proceed with later surgery, and keep cancer at bay for awhile longer. I’ll take it.
If it’s not working, then we don’t know. Clinical trials, hope for the best.
Filaments, fibers, fears.
Pink Stinks 