It's been 679 days since I found the cancer. I'm still here and still cancer-free. I had a mammogram on Monday and was going to update the blog before then, since I assumed the results would be bad and, you know, I could get in one last post before I had to start writing about chemo again. But I couldn't get the app to work so I didn't get the post up, and then it turned out that everything was okay. That tells you where my mindset is, though, and will maybe always be. I fully expect the other shoe to drop. The shoe is too big; if you are a person who likes to be prepared, you can't safely assume it's going to stay in the air.
I also just debated going up and deleting "cancer-free," because maybe that's jinxing things to write it down. But I will be brave and leave it there.
Despite all those dramatic things I just said and the hard fact that I'm never not aware of it on some level, most of the time I'm fine. I tend to worry more about things when I'm bored and don't have anything else to think about. Fortunately my new job keeps me much busier than I was in the past so those times are fewer than they used to be. I have also found that I'm much more sensitive to uncertainty than I was before; I always thought things in life generally worked out to be fine, and cancer showed me this is not the case. Bad stuff happens when you least expect it, when you're doing everything right and are completely happy with your life, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. My cancer being a highly treatable Stage IA is not a comfort, because the fact that it exists at all is cold hard evidence: the jig is up. There isn't any reason it couldn't have been Stage IV. Or pancreatic cancer, or MS, or whatever. We are all subject to whims of the universe over which we have absolutely no control.
I swear I meant that paragraph to be positive! Really. But the point is that a fundamental part of my worldview has been proven to be false on a very deep level, and it's difficult to adjust the rest of my life to this new reality. I've lost the sense of innate confidence that I'm correctly interpreting the world and the people around me. I assume this will get better and easier with more distance from diagnosis. It's already better than it used to be.
Regardless, I press on. I only have one more scan at the 6 month interval and then I'm back to once a year. The odds are good: less than a 5% chance of both local and distant recurrence. Of the women I went through chemo with, none of them have recurred, and almost all of them had bigger tumors than mine that had spread outside the breast. Treatment is the best it's ever been, there is no doubt, and it's getting better all the time. But there's still no cure, either.
I want there to be a cure.
I want a guarantee. But I know none of us have that - the problem is, as a cancer survivor, you can't ignore it anymore. Nobody ever really believes some terrible random thing can happen to them. You can think you believe it, but until you get the diagnosis you don't believe it. I believe it. Now, for me, it's happened. It's real, and it can't be unlearned. We are fragile. Everything in our lives is out of our control.
So, uh, what I'm doing is going to Germany on vacation and having lots of cats. I'd like to say I'm doing a better job of being mindful and maximizing my health and appreciating what I have and all that, but in reality I'm still over here eating twelve Starbursts a day and freaking out about how the best way to efficiently serve coffee at the Board of Directors meeting. Just living, I guess. What else can I do? Tomorrow it will be 680 days.
