Cancer is Crap: Resurfacing
Boy, that was a long nap.
I have been AWOL from the blogosphere and I apologize. I also offer my warmest thanks for all the notes & comments & check-ins & where-the-heck-are-yous. I was off hosting a vegan yoga seminar at which I instructed participants in the art of blowing it out their third eye.
Just kidding.
We escaped to my Aunt’s big, rambling house in the “crunchyside,” as Georgia calls it. The weather was beautiful and there’s a big beach nearby, and it was just the sunny, beachy, relaxed family time that we needed. I even managed to walk 11K one day to get ready for next weekend’s big 60K Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk.
After the shock of Wednesday’s news, I actually found myself feeling a deep, centred sense of calm on Thursday (and I wasn’t even sedated at the time.) For some reason I was filled with the conviction that I am going to be fine. I know that nothing is “fine” right now, but I believe it all will be eventually, and that I’m going to be ok. It was bizarre, but I went with it.
That feeling more or less carried me right through the weekend, until yesterday when I completely lost the whole calm, centred thing and morphed into a roiling receptacle of anxiety and fear. It started because after a night of coughing I realized that an annoying little dry cough I’ve had for the last few weeks has bloomed into a constant and not-so little dry cough, sending me into paroxysms of cancer-panic: Is this the handiwork of the evil lung-spots?? Are they spreading so rapidly that they will soon overtake my lungs completely? Oh my god, I am going to die!!
You know the drill. Or can probably imagine it. It’s not a good drill.
Luckily today I saw my cancer shrink, the Amazing Dr. Hunter, who made short work of my cancer-panic and talked me through a few other things besides. And as I biked home from the hospital I could feel the calm and the conviction returning. (Yes, feeling calm and centred even while biking home in Toronto traffic. He’s that good.)
I guess this is how it will go: having metastasized cancer will be like a particularly tumultuous and stupid relationship where I will oscillate between feeling confident, courageous and in control and becoming a total blubbering, freaked-out basket-case.
And then I will dump cancer’s ass and move on with my life.
