Breast Cancer

October was breast cancer month. Month? Well for me it's been the BC year. The year my life unraveled. Lots and lots of chaos. I lost a relationship, a home, had to move several times, my finances are a shambles. And none of it really matters much. I can get it all back. It's just stuff. You can always get more stuff. It's been the worst thing that's happened to me and the best at the same time.

I have just hit a wall all us cancer patients seem to hit after chemotherapy, kinda depressed. Six months of it. I never thought I'd get through. So much anger! I am like a child who wants to tell a Big Person how much it hurt and where they stuck the needles and how sick I felt and that some of my friends ran away and didn't come back. That hurt more than anything. I can only hope there is a God out there holding me, and telling me all will be well.

We keep ourselves all hyped and girded up, stiff-upper-lip you know, for chemo, and just get through each day as best as we can -- and then whoosh! it's over. And and I look around and I say, That's it? Who do I get mad at? Who do I hit? I got mugged and poisoned and I stuck it out and didn't cry (much). I did it. I even quit smoking in the middle of it. I feel like someone's gotten away with doing something horrible to me. They need to pay.
Most days, I wouldn't trade the experience for the world.
With cancer, I am a colorless citizen of the universe. People look at me as though I have some kind of special answer they lack. As though the thick and seemingly insurmountable hills and layers of status and stuff and race and appearance have been strip-mined and there we are: naked to eachother, mortal defenseless human beings, temporary travellers. I can look anyone in the eye and find them in there, behind all the temporal stuff. I got a secret. We all die. You're eligible too.
Now I am going to have surgery. I am the poster child for Not Tolerating Chemotherapy Well. Not this gal. I am in such rough shape they want to do a full cardiac workup first. As the anaesthesiologist put it "I don't want to put a tube in someone and not be able to take it out." Finally a take-charge, bossy, brilliant doctor. He's perfect for his job. I can finally go limp and let him do his work. I so need to stop carrying all this. I can let go and drop down to the bottom of my internal ocean where it is dark and silent and sleep.
I am not thinking about waking up, not yet. There will be another hard chapter when that happens. Missing body parts and all. I can only do this journey one step at a time. Right now my task is to breathe in and out, keep my feet elevated and wait for this darkness to pass and the color to come back into the world. Hug the cats. Fill the birdfeeders. Talk to the other women and men who are travelling this road with me, or have gone before so I know I am not alone.
If I can find a good enough movie, maybe I can even cry.