Cancer Journey in Photos

My husband took these shots. Kind of holds the story in photographic bullet points. 

And so it begins. Standing at the top of the hallway, the journey of discovery and treatment still ahead of me.
This was taken at Group Health Capital Hill.

One ultrasound where we found a tumor (Feb 17, 2012), two needle biopsies, a lot of crying
and a little bit of hysterics later, we find out definitively that it's cancer on May 23, 2012.
Taken at Group Health Tacoma Medical Center.

When I'm afraid (and I was totally terrified in this photo), I close my eyes and pray that I will become a tree.
That my roots will reach deeply into the Source and Center, that my trunk will hold me up and flex in the wind,
and that my branches will see far visions of what I can't see anchored to the ground.

I thought I would be so nervous about the surgery and I was super relaxed that day.
 I surprised myself. June 22, 2012.

Surgery time! That's my ID number so that Randy could
watch the screen and see my surgery progress. Very cool.

There I am, Dr. Harper's patient. 

Not having cancer is WAY sexier than having cancer!

Dr. Amy Harper from GHC, my awesome surgeon. She was fantastic.
She came to check on me but I was completely out of it.

It didn't take too long for me to feel well enough to sit up a bit and even eat.
It was slow healing, six weeks without a voice, but I still made sure I was heard. ;)

The next day, we went home. I thought they were crazy to let me go so soon.
We stopped on the way home and had the best Pho, so healing.
My nose ring was an unfortunate casualty.

Surgery to remove cancer: complete.

Thanks to my amazing husband for taking these shots and documenting the journey. :)

Remission

Another interesting nugget, I realized.. I say that I am 'cured' and that is not true. I am in remission. I have feelings about that. I just don't really know what they are yet.

Messages

I sat down at my computer this morning and one of the messages that popped up was an RIP for someone I went to high school with- I was friends with her husband back then, when we were kids, too. She died of breast cancer.

When I saw the message thread I was thrown back into a dream that I had this morning that I'd forgotten as soon as my eyes opened.

I'm laying on an exam table having a physical from my warm, kind, connected physician. There is intimacy between us, we are on a first name basis, she is practical and honest and direct. She's palpating the lymph nodes in my groin, and hard. It hurts how much she's pressing down but I just breathe into my belly and wait for it to be over because I trust her and know she's looking thoroughly.

She pauses.

"There's a node, right there." She presses on it. I can't feel it but in my mind I can imagine the hard marble under her finger tips, being worked back and forth as she palpates it.

I feel myself pop out of my body. In my head, I say, "FUCK." Out loud, I say, "Great." And I smile.

She keeps pressing down and my brain goes to where we're going next... needle aspiration, will that be painful? How much pain medication can I get? She interrupts my thoughts -

"There's another one."

Now I say it out loud. "FUCK." She's looking at me knowing that I know what this probably means, given my 'cancer history', she's looking at me with love in her heart and a physician's planning mind- what tests do we run, what treatment would we consider- and I lay on the table focused on the two little invaders that will completely shift my life, again.

Then I woke up, rested and relishing in a long night's sleep, and forgot the entire dream.

Superheroes and secrets

She lays the cards down, face up in front of me, in some layout that means something to her, but nothing to me. Laying runes she's plucked from a purple velvet bag on top of each card, she tells me what she sees.

"You are focusing too much on the negative," she says gently, warmth and understanding in her eyes. She knows what went on last year, why I am now fucked up, unknown to myself, and lost. I wonder what she means. How am I focusing on the negative? I'm happy, I'm making plans, moving forward. I'm trying to integrate these experiences but I feel stuck.

After a thorough reading I pay her and thank her, and I leave, chewing gently on her statement. I don't get it. I know she's on to something because I can't stop thinking about it, but I can't figure it out.

That night someone I'm chatting with me asks me how I'm doing and I start to answer in my head (because I don't say it to everyone), I'm fucked up.

It hits me- I am not fucked up. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm finding my way through this heavy forest with prickly foliage, but I am not broken. I am still moving forward, finding my path, and carving one where there's no path to be seen. I am not fucked up.

At the cancer support group I went to one of the facilitators lent me Crazy Sexy Cancer. I had thought about getting this book when I had cancer but I didn't have the courage to do it. My friend Valerie and I had gone on a shopping trip a few years ago when our friend Whitney, at age 24, was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. We bought her this book and all kinds of goodies. Whitney died a couple of years ago. Getting this book reminded me of her, so I couldn't do it.

I got through having cancer but there was a lot I didn't have as I went through it. I had no desire to overwhelm myself with data, and I certainly didn't want other people (who didn't have cancer, or who had survived cancer, so.. pretty much anyone) telling me how to have or deal with having cancer. I was the one who had to wake up breathing every day, I was the one who had to get through needle biopsies that hurt and scared me, and I was the one who had to wait in the purgatory between a test and the results. I couldn't handle the idea of a book that somehow glamorized or simplified or prettied up cancer.

Now I've cracked this book and I find I'm cracking in other ways, too. I climbed into my bed tonight for a few moments to decompress from an incredibly busy day, and grabbed it. I read that the author tells her father that she has tumors on her liver and he says, "I will be strong for you."

I don't have parents to be strong for me. I had to be strong for my mother, and I have no relationship with my father, so I had no parent to say, "I will hold your hand through this. I will be your strength. Fall into me, I am safe, and steady, and I will hold you."

I've asked myself probably millions of times, "Why do people need parents?" When I was going through cancer I didn't feel that I needed parents, I didn't wish that I had that element in my life. Now, looking back, I see that it could have been different, that I might not have had to be so strong, wrapped in the lap of the person who woudl love me unconditionally, and who would always want my best interest first.

As I start to look at my cancer journey, I realize that I am now starting to poke at it and not from the place of being 'fucked up', but from someone who survived cancer and is just very, simply, changed by it. Nothing more. I am changed. I don't know the scope of that, I don't know where that ends. I don't know when I'll want to stop talking about it. I don't know when I will stop reaping the gifts of discovering a new facet of myself, thank you cancer- I don't know. I just know that right now, for the first time in my life, cancer has shown me what it feels like to need a parent in my life - even the tiniest glimpse. It's more than I've ever felt.

My friend made Leah and me capes we can wear, capes that show we are strong, superheros, survivors of cancer. Leah talked about how good it felt to put hers on when she was feeling weak, or down, or struggling with anxiety. It's something tangible that reminds her of how far she's come, and who she is. I thought, "I've not worn mine like that, yet." I wore mine to show it off, to be sassy. I did not wear it because I needed comfort.

A few days ago I wrapped my cape around my shoulders and I just breathed in, and breathed out. I felt vulnerable and strong, I felt like I was in my body. I felt like my cape told a part of my story, and it offered protection, too. My crazy Beatles cape, made by my friend who generously sent us these gifts out of love and support - makes me feel not like a superhero, but that I know something special.

I am not fucked up. I laugh now, that I thought it, even for a moment, much less for months and months. I thought I was broken, that I could not be repaired. I thought the best I could hope for was a bad patch job that would just hold the parts of me together long enough that I could keep moving forward, far away from these experiences. Instead I find that this is just a new phase of me, this is me, too. This is me. It's okay that I don't recognize myself- what is life but an adventure in self discovery?

First Cancer support group today

Today I went to my first ever survivors of cancer group. First support group. I was nervous. I had Eidie with me and what if they didn't want a little kid there? I thought out all the scenarios. What if I cried- that would be fine, but what if someone else felt like they couldn't because she was there?

I started talking myself out of it. Maybe I should just go next time. It would be fine. My friend L, who invited me and whom I was meeting, would be fine without me. She'd understand.

I kept driving and found myself at the oncology office where the group is held. Oncology. That's not a word that strikes me, because I never worked with an oncologist. I met with my family practice doctor and my endocrinologist, but never spoke to a 'cancer doctor'. I feel cheated in some ways, that support would have made my cancer journey something so different. I feel bitter, that my cancer was relegated to 'unnecessary' to meet with someone as important as an oncologist. I feel relieved, that it was so common and easy that I didn't need an oncologist. Mostly, I feel jealous that I didn't get it. Yes, jealous.

When I'm awake I can taste 

how bitter I've become
And it's more than I can bear

I went to this group of beautiful women, all in separate stages of their cancer dance. One woman is just two weeks from her diagnosis. How is she holding herself up right, I ask myself. Then I remember that I kept working and living like there was nothing new, making room in my mind for the thoughts about cancer but never setting aside my schedule so that I could just.... what... have cancer? It's so funny how I expect other people to fall apart with a diagnosis like that but found no need to do so myself.

We talked about grief and I had a lot to say, but it didn't go the way I thought it would. I think I imagined that what I would get was reassuring, knowing nods, acknowledging sounds. I did not expect to be boldly challenged in my thinking, and in my process.

"Maybe you should..."
"Give this a try..."
"Maybe you're going about it this way so you don't have to..."

I realized today that I spend so much time analyzing myself that uninvited, it pisses me right off when other people presume to do it. I feel like I am the one who has the right to decide whether I want my actions, thoughts, motives to be questioned. But there I sat, trying hard not to close down, feeling the anger rise in my belly, struggling to keep my heart open- and all the while knowing that there was some profound truth they were speaking to me or I would not be reacting so.

So I stay too busy to feel things- so what. If you had to feel all the shit I have on deck, you'd find some menial chore to do too, and fast. I want to grieve on my terms. As in, I want to control it. I want to decide when to let go of control, I want to decide when to let it run over me, so that I can decide when to stand back up and dust myself off.

Instead, I drive down the road and think the craziest thoughts, ones I don't dare write because... I find myself worrying what the impact would be- would it worry someone? Hurt someone? Odd, for me, but there it is. I'll find the right words, but not today.

Sitting with perfect strangers looking at me, nodding in my direction as someone else who doesn't know me talks about the holes in my process was like being stripped naked on the side of the highway for all of the passersby to see.  This is something very new to me. I found myself unable to detach myself from this vulnerable, naked feeling, that I couldn't just decide who I wanted to be in this group but could only react, and catch up. It was really hard. I left there angry and enlightened, toying with never coming back, because fuck that shit and knowing at the same time that I'd never let myself off the hook that way. I sat there and thought, "I had cancer. I can do this."

The note transcribed reads:

Who are you to tell me what I should do to feel my grief? What do you know about me?

Sap rising with the anger and as I feel it, I know there is something daringly true about what she's saying. I hear her saying that I am resisting the slow pace of the process, of grief. I expect it to fit into the empty spaces between the edges of my busy, full life.

I am sitting in this room, and I am more naked- to myself - than I have been since I can remember. I find that I am bitter, I am angry. At you, and at you, and at me. I tell myself I will never come back here. I am not seen the way I like, the way I control, the way that is comfortable. The blankets are ripped away by the hands of other women's experiences and we are revealed, vulnerable. But we do not cover our nakedness from each other. 

I am brave and strong. Maybe this is the Medicine I need right now.

{Around the edge of the paper}

I want to feel it in categories, in little packets, like how I experienced it. I want to be finished fully with cancer before I walk through Africa. I want to enjoy my triumph before I delve into the death of my mother. I won't get it. 

Status: FUBAR

How can one person feel so many conflicting things at once and not break into little tiny shards of herself? I  don't understand it.

I realized a couple of days ago that I do not like my scar. I have to stop myself from saying that I actually hate my scar. I don't want to hate a part of myself. Yet, for some reason, I do. I realized it after looking at myself in the mirror, all dressed up, made up, earrings, hair- check, check, check. And then there is this wide scar across my neck that just mars the whole picture. When I wear something that covers it- a choker, a scarf, I feel comforted. I feel like I look normal. I hadn't realized those feelings consciously until a few days ago, and then it hit me- I fucking hate this scar.

Yesterday I was at the lab getting blood drawn. The tech drawing me said, "When did you have your surgery?" I told her, June. She showed me her scar, a thin, thin line in the hollow of the base of her throat. Barely there. You can't even see it unless you look. She said, "I had mine in August." I wanted to say, "Oh yeah? Good for you. Screw you." Instead I said, "It looks great."

I feel angry that this happened. Maybe I'm late. Maybe I am feeling the things I thought I was supposed to feel when I was still moving through it all. Why am I categorizing my feelings? I'm just feeling what I feel. RIght now, I don't understand this whole thing. Why did I have cancer, and why did my mom die? Why do I ask why? I know these answers but on the deep-inside-of-me, there is something in me that is SO MAD.

Today a song came on and it reminded me of my mom. I felt her sitting next to me, wanting to comfort me as I got more and more sad, and emotional, driving down the road. In my mind's eye I turned to my mother and punched and hit her.

I'm being confronted with how mad I am that she was never enough. Not that she needed to be, but I needed her to try to be, and she couldn't, and wouldn't. I hate asking WHY?! because it's a pointless endeavor, and yet I still want to beat her and hurt her and scream in her face, WHY WHY WHY?

I feel like I'm fucked up. I feel like I've been impaled on a giant drill bit that has routed out my very insides leaving me scarred and messy on the inside. And empty.

I don't understand how I can feel all of that, and feel the deep love I do for what I do. I don't undrstand how I can be that angry, and that on-edge, and still dream of my future, and what it will be like to be a midwife, to walk the halls of my midwifery school and think of the women who have made that journey before me. How can I feel such profound gratitude and be so humbled by the love of my husband - and of my kids- and be so sickened with anger, to feel so chaotic inside at the same time? I don't get it.

I have been feeling things in my neck lately and I am convinced it's just a body memory of where I was a year ago- with swollen lymph nodes and cancer growing inside of me. It felt like this. It was achy, and tender, and called my attention. This time, I don't want to go to the doctor. I don't want to have this conversation about cancer, I don't want to have someone touch my neck and try to reassure me. I Don't want to wonder if I'm okay, or if I'm down this rabbit hole again. I want to just set it aside for now. I really can't do anything more than that, I just can't. I have to set it aside for now.

Learning about trauma

I think on the heels of this year, I am traumatized. That sounds dramatic, but I mean it in a very down to earth, functional way. A broken bone is a trauma. A breaking of self - a trauma in the same sense.

This year... wow. I still lack the words to describe what 2012 was. Even encapsulating it to 'within a time frame' feels a little arrogant to me, as if I am daring the Gods to touch 2013 as well. As if, there is a beginning and an end that isn't framed just with birth and death. There is just living, there is just what we have to do each day. The only end is when we cease to be, and every day is a new chance for creation and destruction to arrive in our lives.

I saw a therapist a couple of times this year, once on either side of my trip to Africa. She was exactly what I think I've always wanted in a therapist, and I just can't prioritize it. I go in there and I feel so together, and I know I am not, in many, many ways. I am not together.

I am coming up on the 1-year anniversary of finding out something was wrong. Seeing that tumor on the screen and knowing that it might be something nefarious but not letting myself get scared just yet. How did I do that? It feels like a lifetime ago. Now I do get shaken in ways I didn't before. Lately I find myself looking in the mirror and wondering how being 36 shows up on my face, on my body. Having kids does change you in many ways, but what is aging doing? Why am I suddenly caring about that? I feel more beautiful now than I ever did in my entire life, but these last several days I find myself peering at myself in the mirror. Maybe at some level I know that I no longer recognize myself, and I'm looking again to find something familiar.

I went back and read a lot of this blog and how things went down. I like to write things after I've got some grasp of language for it, which is generally starting to slope down the back end of the experience. I feel like there is no back end to this. It doesn't feel like something that has a beginning and an end, like other things did.

The really interesting thing that inspired me to write was realizing that for the first time in my life and I'll I've experienced, I feel after this year that I've 'gone through' something of note. My life has always been just my life, just like yours is. People react to my story because it stands out to them in some way, but for me, it's just what I lived, there is no comparison to someone else's life (which is SO silly and pointless). But this  last year- a trip to the Redwoods, cancer, Africa, and my mother's death - this feels like I Went Through Something Hard.

In the middle of it all I could say, "It is what it is", and let go of attachment, just breathe in the moment and ride through it. Now I feel like, "WHAT?!" I still feel like I am in shock in many ways. I am meeting anxieties that are new. I am discovering ways of thinking that are strange to others, like the perpetual and constant focus on what will happen when I die, and wondering if it will happen today - will that car hit mine? Will a drunk driver swerve and hit me? Will an earthquake take us? What will happen if I am the only one who lives? What would happen if Randy had to live without me and one of our children, or two of them, or all of them? This is like a ticker tape running through my mind and it never seemed odd to me until I told someone and they were shocked. That made me think- maybe I'm having some anxieties because of What I Went Through. Seems normal, and reasonable.

Here I am, still trying to get my bearings. In many ways I don't recognize myself. In MOST ways, I don't. In precious ways I know myself, exactly who I am, but I feel like earth that has been turned over, the tearing of ways I used to be, now open and in the process of becoming who I am now, who I will be tomorrow. What if I don't like that person? I don't want to be a person who worries about growing old, and yet... I look in the mirror and I hunt for those signs. I know better, and feel silly. I tell myself, this is just a coping mechanism, it is just for now. It isn't drinking, or sleeping around, or doing drugs. It isn't lying, or vandalism. Wait- maybe it is, a little bit of vandalism on my own heart. Oh well. :)

At the end of the day, I am happy again. I am filled with gratitude at almost all times, I feel that these are the places where I recognize myself. I am bitter in some ways but it does not dominate my feelings. It's a secret dark closet where I hide the things I don't want to share with anyone - where I keep my alter ego who is wild, and reckless, and doesn't give a fuck about anyone, or anything, or herself. She is new, I don't know her well yet. Shadow. So many ways it arrives.

Still figuring myself out. Reading a book about trauma, and one about emotionally unavailable mothers. Not reading as much as, it's in my Kindle for when I get the inspiration to crack them. I'm tired of alway having to recover and heal myself from something. Maybe I just get to be churned up/fucked up/whatever for a while, and that's okay.