Before I was diagnosed I distinctly remember a day where I was feeling high on life. It was a moment of almost euphoria because everything seemed to be going so well in my life and it hit me with an overwhelming sense of happiness. What quickly followed though was a scary question to myself of “what if things are a little too good”, “….am I doomed for some misfortune?”. It sounds crazy, but this scenario really did happen. I think about this a lot, because the fact that my fear came to a realization, is terrifying. It makes me wonder if this type of fear is going to come to realization in other areas of my life down the road, and that when things start feeling a little too good, BOOM – think again!
I feel like I’ve almost gotten back to that euphoric state again and I’m terrified. Things are going so well and I seem to just be waiting for something to hit again. I have an exciting year ahead of me but I can’t seem to truly get excited for any of it because I have PTSD from having experienced the awful feeling of everything coming to a full halt. Being able to trust life again has been hard.
At the same time though, I feel like I’m Charlotte from Sex and the City movie #1 when she cried to Carrie about how perfect her life was and that she was so scared something bad was going to happen. Carrie then cuts her off and says “honey, you shit your pants this year, I think you’re good”.
I think I need to tell myself the same thing, but instead of shitting my pants, I had breast cancer (I would totally trade in cancer for shitting my pants any day though). So maybe I am in fact “good” for a while yet. Sometimes breast cancer feels so normal to me because it’s been a huge chunk of my life for the last 12 months. When I take a step back though and become an outsider looking in, I start to realize that it’s a pretty big f*cking deal. I know this because I can see it on people’s faces when I tell them for the first time. The “OMG WHAT?!” look I constantly get, or tears – I get that too.
Unfortunately the words “cancer”, “chemotherapy”, and “radiation” have become words in my every-day vocabulary. I forget sometimes that a decent portion of the population don’t have to know these words in relation to themselves – or if they’re really lucky – in relation to anyone they know or love.
I had a bit of a scare earlier this year in January where I had a check-up with one of my doctor’s and they mentioned that my right side felt a little lumpy. “…..was your right side always this lumpy?”…. Wait what? Should I be worried? What are you saying?!. She then proceeded to point out where it was so I could feel. And feel it, I did. Ugh. What is this? Was this here before? Why didn’t I think of doing a full self-exam last year when I had the chance to know what my normal was on my right side? This whole time I have been so concerned about my left side that I didn’t even give the other side a second thought.
She then proceeded to ask me if I wanted to move up my “imaging” that was scheduled for March…… WHAT? You think I should MOVE UP my imaging? This sounds serious?
All I was thinking about though was, “are you f*cking kidding – If this ends up being bad news I CANNOT cancel my trip to Sri Lanka AGAIN”. That would be way too soul crushing. All of a sudden thoughts were going through my mind of “ok well maybe I could do surgery right away so that I have time to go on the trip and then I’ll start chemo again when I get back”…… yes, no joke these were the types of thoughts going through my head. I even considered just leaving it at the risk that finding anything would require me to cancel the trip. UGH. To say that the beginning of the New Year was stressful for me is a severe understatement.
I went home that night and sat on the thought, all the while continually feeling around on my right side and wondering what the heck was going on. Could this be real? What are the chances that it could have already came back?? Chances must be low, but I already hit the odds on having breast cancer under 30, so I’ll probably get hit with this stupidly small statistic too – just my luck (on a side note though – I need to buy a lottery ticket to make something out of my dumb luck). After a couple days of these stressful mental battles, I finally decided to call the MRI office and move up my scan ASAP. It occurred to me that despite everything, I’d never be able to live with the “what if” that could come by not having done the scan when given the chance. So there I was, January 9th, lying on the MRI bed getting my scan, all the while TERRIFIED that this could really be something – and I was about to find out sooner than I wanted to. It was a disappointing week or two while this all went down – the thought that I could be hit again so soon, but more so that I had to consider that the odds could be so strongly against me YET AGAIN. Such a sad thought, and it makes me scared for the next however many years of my life – always having to br ready for a small statistic to hit me.
THANKFULLY, I got my results back and it read “no evidence of malignancy”. If you don’t know what “malignancy” means, then I am jealous of you because that means you aren’t closely associated to anything to do with cancer that you would otherwise have that word in your vocabulary!
English translation: no cancer.
WOW that was a HUGE relief. A relief I needed so badly because not only did it rule out anything that doctor got me all freaked out about, but it also confirmed that all my treatment worked. While it’s only one test of many that goes into diagnosing someone, it’s a very sensitive test, so if it’s showing nothing to the extent that the technician can confidently say “no evidence of malignancy”, then we lookin’ good!
…..not going to lie though, it’s scary to write this in such an excited way. It’s like I’m psyching myself out.
SO that was January for me. How was your January? Thankfully my travel plans remain intact as of right now and I’m getting relatively more confident as the days go by that I actually am in fact going to get to Sri Lanka this time. Stay tuned!
To conclude, as Carrie Bradshaw would say “you shit your pants this year, I think you’re good”.
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