Cancer recurrence – Pink Stinks

This River, It Rises and Falls

I want to take a moment to thank the readers of this blog. Your responses, your emails, and your support mean a great deal to me. I have recently developed a very serious case of neuropathy in my right hand, which is such a cruel blow, as it is my writing hand, working and coffee hand, and now it burns and burns. I drop spoons, fumble with combs. So I cannot reply, offer the comments, or develop this blog as much as I like. I can’t visit or support others’ blogs as much as I’d like. But I read when I can, send love and support, and in this sister- and brotherhood that is often silent know that I stand with you.

It is January 2020. Each marker of time is a signpost, another hill or copse on the orienteering map of cancer unknowns.

silhouette of tree on top of the hill — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

It feels bewildering to be here. Each day is some new emotional or physical landscape. Today it’s weak and singed fingers. It’s thinning but not bald hair. It’s anger at the world and gratitude for light.

I hear the Jim Nabors song from a far radio somewhere:

Sunrise, sunset, Sunrise, sunset

Swiftly flow the days

Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers…..

This is a song about childhood passing, but it speaks to me too about time. Opening and closing. Starts and stops.

* * *

I had a CT and bone scan last week. There is “good” news. “Good” is in quotation marks because when you’ve been with this disease, this abusive lover, as long as I’ve been (almost four years now), you begin to detach from each peak and valley. Detachment is an emotional survival tool. I cannot anymore ride with the extremes of shock or giddiness of this body’s data. I take it as it comes. I hear it and think “What does this mean? Ok, what next?” I no longer trust even the positive outcomes. Though I celebrate and though I thank, I have also numbed myself in order to protect myself from the fatigue of grief’s extremes.

The “good” news? And it is good. My lung tumors have shrunk considerably. The bone metastases are stable. Steady as she goes. The current treatment is working. All signs point north.

The price? Numbness, burning, and neuropathy in my writing arm. Crashing fatigue and nausea for two weeks each month. Anger and irritability. Family and friends who I worry are getting sick of all these peaks and valleys. I’m so grateful they’ve stood by. Their continued presence is a kind of sunlight.

Yet tempus fugit. Time flies.

This life, it is a kind of No-Man’s Land of in-betweens. There is no France, no England. There are only remains.

* * *

This post sounds darker than I feel. Reader, if you were with me here, I’d sit us down for coffee or tea and ask: How are you? How is work? Or How are the kids? Always I am working to turn my gaze back to the world, the people here and now, away from the body. I must remember. I can go to dinner, walk, plant a few seeds or bulbs here and there. Each day truly is a gift.

And yet my own truth is that there is damage, too. There are ruins to rebuild, landscapes to level. Cinderblocks to place.

It is one whole circuitous map, this rubble and this rain.

And the river, always ongoing.

river between green leafed tree — Photo by Rachel Baskin Photography on Pexels.com

Jealousy and Metastatic Cancer with a Disappointing Ending.

I was recently diagnosed with stage iv triple negative breast cancer. This wasn’t my first time with it – three years ago, I received my initial diagnosis of stage 3 of the same disease. Once I finished treatments – mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation – I was told I was “cured.” I thought I was done.

Not so. In 2018 I had my first recurrence (a tumor near my ribs) and had surgery to remove it.

In the spring of this year, late March 2019, nearly three years to the day, I was diagnosed with a second recurrence. This time, metastatic. Another tumor in the same area as last year’s, plus lesions in my right upper arm bone, and a suspicious, to-be-watched lesion on my liver.

The cancer had spread. It had metastasized.

And what “metastatic” means to me is “inoperable.” It means terminal. It means The Rest of Your Life.

It means: You’ll never be free of it, it’s here to stay.

The hope I once had of returning to normal is gone. Gone. I will now be living with cancer for as long as I am alive.

And so once again I make adjustments. I grieve, my husband and I talk about our options, we regroup.

* *

I wanted this post to be about jealousy. I wanted to talk about what this new diagnosis means in terms of loss and change, and the way I feel and talk about time. I wanted to talk about what energy means, what an average day used to feel like, and what it is now. How making coffee was just that, and not an arduous series of breaths, painful movements, knocked-over cups and then utter, exhausted relief in crash-sitting to drink it.

I wanted to talk about the ache I feel when I scroll through social media sites and witness families smiling in the sun, a photo of a mother and child in an inner tube on a river, a lazy and slow river where on a beach dogs and small children upon arrival run to greet them. I wanted to write about the long-held ache in my throat when photo after photo of mountains, some friend’s reunion in a cabin, the Paris couple’s kiss, the neighbor’s good times at the local pub, and all of their clicked “likes” and “looking good” comments show up on my feed as if everything were normal. As if time, like the lazy river, was to be had in these long hours, fistful after fistful, all of us just looking around in total wonder, endlessness its own known gift.

Dear god, I miss the eyes half-closed sheer bliss of not knowing it, all’s well, fat tire tube and being just another body in a lit, slow-moving, unpunctured ring.

* *

I wanted to talk about the italics of energy and normal, the new italics of time. Each of these words is stretching forward past itself in an attempt to grab more, take more, because their own current letter legs are weak. Today’s an unknown, the words seem to tell me, so make sure there’s a bit of them in the future. Bank all three: energy, normal, time. Always lean towards the next hour, the next day.

-Is not how I really want to live, though. Too much leaning forward means a weaker grounding, means the weight on one’s footing is likelier to sway. It means I’m not here fully. It means rush and hurry.

* *

I’m so jealous of other people’s lives. Their health, their beautiful families, their cancer- and fear-free lives—

the ability to plan, to think in one- and five-year increments. The gift of time that is handed to them. The safety glass that still protects their days — it’s an illusion of course but they still have it—

Maybe that’s you? Lucky. You’re a lucky one. And you’re innocent of course. How would you know, did I know, that we had that luck when we had it? No one does. It’s the nature of health to be unseen until it’s not. It’s a Plexiglass dome on top of a building.

For me, that safety glass is gone now. A wind is blowing and always will blow. It’s a closer step now to a long way down.

* *

I feel obligated to write something hopeful but I can’t.

It feels more authentic to me to just stay here and say: sudden.

To say: time.

I am not a comfort.

When Cancer Comes Back

Sharecancersupport.org has kindly published my story on their website. I wrote this last winter, and am feeling better now.

https://www.sharecancersupport.org/2019/01/johannas-story/