Friday, February 1, 2013

First days of chemo

Okay, so Cancer College just got mightier. I am going for a PhD now. This is a darker and twistier journey than we all first thought. The PET scan has revealed that the cancer has spread, a lot. I will know more next week after my team (I now have a team of oncologists and radiologists) meets to discuss the best course of action for what the PET scan revealed. I guess the radioactive sugar can reveal a lot. I am not invited to this team meeting even though it is me that is bringing them together and me they are discussing.

My body. My liver. My bones. My breast. My lymph nodes. My life...

A dear friend listened to me bemoan the western medical system. "I am not whole to them. I am only the sickness. They don't want to hear that I am a mother. That I am here to help people. That I work with so many children. They don't want to know how much loss I have experienced the past year of my life. They don't want to connect emotions to sickness, that is not tangible to them."

She texted me later and said she was thinking about what I had said and she suggested that it is me that makes the medicine whole. Me. Yeah, me. That is where I first need to start on the wholeness thing. I feel like it did start to happen on the first sleepless night after the breast cancer diagnosis. I am not ready to write about that yet. I have tried to explain it to friends and I feel like they are hearing me, yet it is not coming across right.

Yes, I will. I will make the medicine whole. I trust this cancer has already made me more whole than I have ever been in this life. The fucking paradox...again and again.

And I will fight this and I will survive because I am a survivor. I will transform this into hope and light and love. I am in the abyss. Indeed, I have landed at the bottom. The chemo is coursing through my body. I just had to quietly make my way to the bathroom thinking I was going to vomit. Nope, just dry heaves, which are a million times better than actually puking. I will soon start to notice my hair on my pillow is no longer attached to my head. The nausea is almost constant, but mostly bearable with the meds.

I am not telling anyone about this blog yet. I need it just for me. In the wee hours when I wake with that tangy taste of almost vomiting and reach blindly for my anti-nausea pills, I know I have gotten my sleep and there is no going back to magic dreamland for me tonight. Trying to feel my feelings about all of this when nauseous is not a good freaking idea. It just increases the nausea, so I write for my own self. I write to pass the time and attempt to catch some of my buzzing thoughts without actually crying. It sounds stupid I know. I should want to cry a fucking river right now, but crying seems to intensify the side-effects of the chemo and definitely makes the nausea turn into dry heaves or puking. So, I write to gently vent off some of the strong feelings churning inside of me. Maybe I will find that crying until I puke is what I need to do. Not yet though, I have not yet discovered that to be helpful. So, I write. And I wait for the dawn of the coming day, where my babies will open their eyes and say, "Mama, I love you."

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