Sick of myself

I know I write for me, and not for you. I have to admit that as churned up as I am right now I can't bring myself to come here and talk about it because it just feels like the same old shit we've already been through together. It exhausts me, it must be exhausting for you. I feel like all I can say is the same thing over and over... I know I'm processing, but honestly I am kind of sick of myself.

This whole process is so intense and in its own way traumatizing- to a smaller scale but still I feel like something is slowly being sucked out of me that I will have to work very hard to shove back in. My neck is just so uncomfortable. Not constantly but when it kicks up, it is actually very distracting.

Because I have no answers, I still am in the space of wondering if this is all in my head- if I am just somehow crazy and witchy enough to manifest my own symptoms of something that doesn't exist. Like a pseudo-pregnancy. All the symptoms, none of the baby. Maybe this is the same thing. People ask me, "What does your intuition say?" Every time I hear it, my stomach drops and I feel a little like throwing up. No 'thought' appears necessarily but my body knows something is wrong, even if my head is an earthquake of confusion.

In some ways this is harder than last time. No, it really is harder. Last time I would have moments of fear, that I could have cancer (oh dreaded cancer!) and that it could be the worst kind and that I would have to tell my kids that I was going to die. Those moments weren't too often and didn't last too long. I remember last year as having more edges- edges in between the thoughts, and fear, one moment separated from the next.

This time I feel so run down by it. I'm grieving the death of my mother as I have to let her beloved dog be moved to someone else's home and life and I will likely never see him again. I have to take her house down, and sell the property where she lived the happiest years of her life with her husband, and where her ashes lay. It's as if she's dying again, because the grief is just barely under the surface and springs up dramatically whenever I start to talk in any depth about this.

Layered with that is this underlying drone. Sometimes in the quiet of my heart, when things aren't busy and distracting, that drone rises up and drives out everything else. I feel weighted down by the idea that I'm back here again. When I first saw the endocrinologist, it hadn't quite hit me that I was being tested again for cancer, until I sat down and wrote those words here. Now that I know it, and that my future for a little while will be moving around appointments and tests and waiting for results, it just feels like so much.

So I think about it a lot, and when I am too busy to think about it and I get the chance to make love, or laugh my head off, or see something so beautiful it cracks my heart right open, it is delicious and my heart feels lighter. Those experiences quiet that background noise, and I am grateful that I can do both things. I don't have to miss out on my life and my daughter's first day of Kindergarten or a trip away with my husband, or coffee with a friend, because I am sad or worried. I just keep living.

When the moment ends, and the quiet rises up, and I'm sitting alone in my car, there is no volume at which I can set the music this time that drowns it out. I sing as loud as I can but it doesn't work, it just makes me more sad. Maybe I just need to feel REALLY sad and then I can take the pressure off and let go a bit, because this is literally exhausting me. I am tired all the time, I got to bed early and crash hard. I am sure it's the pace I'm working, but it's also just emotional exhaustion.

I want to talk about it all, and I don't. I am going to say all of the same things every time, and it makes me feel better to say it again, and it also feels like a waste of breath, and it feels tiresome. I'm sick of sitting in this place and ready for some movement.

Today I will get my first Thyrogen shot and tomorrow my second. Friday I will get my blood drawn and next week we will have some information to look at. It won't be anything conclusive and I'm trying hard not to read into anything because I just don't have enough information to have a good context. What I'm most looking forward to/dreading is the ultrasound. IF they find something, I'm back on the biopsy/cancer train, and if they find nothing, what the fuck is all this and how do I make it stop??

30% of people with the kind of cancer I had have recurrences. The prognosis is still fabulous. I am not worried about dying. I'm worried about cancer, and biopsies, and being in pain, and radiation treatments that will poison my body. I'm worried that I will never get to NOT worry about this. It's wearing on me.