I’m writing today for the first time in a few months. I had a freak out, but it was overdue. My freak outs are basically just a moment of honesty at the wrong time or volume.
Cancer demands I both be an individual and also depend on others more than ever. It’s a very difficult balance to ask for what you need when you’re so used to predicting what others need and no one else is accustomed to the job and the oodles of minutia that I obsess over to complete it “my way.”
I have a weary kid trying to thrive while we are in survival mode. I have a husband learning new ways to love me while holding us together to the best of his ability. Instead of me riding on energy’s coattails, my inability to push forward sometimes feels deeply oppressive, time-consuming, and labor intensive.
Therapy is wonderful, but so much can occur in one hour let alone from week to week.
I’m surrounding myself with positive voices, shows, music, and people. The few people that are here, anyway. Some days it feels like if the mail didn’t exist; I’d be an afterthought.
Some days it feels like I’m Kevin McCallister and I’m in a house made of cancer. Sometimes, I realize my feelings are lying to me and my worth is not in my worst moments in life.
Anyway, freak out is over. I’m get so easily overwhelmed and one student loan issue made me snap. My kiddo and I went outside in the cold to reset my brain.
Going outside and physically leaving the house automatically does it for me. It has to be outside. Cold, hot, rainy … the outside is where I’m happiest. (My new cold issue is why that stinks so badly. That’s 1/2 my year in pain just from the temperature.)
She and I thought of a way to mentally reframe chemotherapy and what it’s doing for me. It’s using visual imagery.
I’m imagining my white blood cells are beautiful plumeria. I’m imagining my red blood cells are a bird pollinating. I’m imagining that I am a garden.
Surgery is the shovel. Chemo is the pesticide. Radiation levels everything left.
If I’m a garden, this process is ugly and dangerous sometimes. Gardening doesn’t look good until it’s over. All of this is temporary.
I can fester over my root rot or I can try to water the plumeria and leave bird seed out for that red bird I need to pay attention to me. I can resent what was or try to grow what will be.
Imagining that I am a garden gives me a more peaceful place to tackle my cancer. Instead of grief over treatment and all the side effects and loss that go with it; mentally, I can tend to the garden and remember that it all will make sense when it’s over.
I am a garden.
These are my favorite flowers, currently. They refuse to quit and I REALLY love that about them.
Thank you to the Breast Cancer Fundraiser for my warm feet and warmer heart before chemo
Every morning this week I woke up with the same dream; my hair was gone as I woke up. It was all over my pillow only no one was home to carry me through that moment I’m fearing. Same dream. Same exact dream.
I only have one other recurring dream, but I’m not talking about my teeth all falling out without someone holding my hand. (I kid, but that’s a creepy dream, too.)
I’m freaking out off and on as my hair falls out and sort of gets sheered off by rubbing. I am nine days after my first round of chemo. I am eight days after my Neulasta injection. I am officially a radioactive middle ager.
This dream I have; this nightmare, it has shown me how much I identify myself with my hair. My brain SCREAMS, “Only long hair is feminine.” I was raised as Mennonite and then just raised as a woman.
I am a 45 year old (in 3 hours) woman with deep programming. (I also was sent to the barber as a kid so I have a confusing relationship with my hair.) Once I had the ability, I grew it to my waist. I only cut it a few years ago after weight loss made it thin and uneven.
Hair is discussed a lot in the Bible and covering it or not covering it during church was debated. EVER having it short voluntarily was not even a topic to debate. Women had long hair. Period.
If women had cancer, as a Mennonite kid; I didn’t notice. I missed a lot though. I remember older Mennonite women with significant receding hairlines from right buns, but never noticed anyone bald.
I am very much in my feels today. Tomorrow, I turn 45 and only a few outsiders have visited since I got my diagnosis. There won’t be a party. There won’t be the distraction of life, even for a few hours for a birthday that felt landmark to me.
45 is the halfway point, I always thought. 50 felt too hopeful, but 45 felt like a half-way point I could obtain.
My husband made me a pink cake because this is the year I ring a bell after finishing my cancer treatments.
I feel like I’m sick and getting older in a glass bowl as a fish. I am in a bowl that no one can interact with, everyone can see; but no one is able to step into to sit with me in the suck of cancer and chemo.
I feel the chemo in my emotions and brain. It’s like a bath that never ends and the broken version you felt like yesterday; you now miss. You also forget to miss your higher function and lack of emotions self, because chemo brain makes you forget everything. You feel physically slow, but mentally you feel like you’re walking through Jello that’s been in the fridge for two weeks.
The brain fog feels like someone took all of the proud parts and put me in a cotton candy maker and swirled me around. I feel fragmented into strands that all look sort of familiar, but aren’t structured the way they’re supposed to be.
I look tired, but somehow not just tired. I look sick, but the sickness inside is more sick than a bald head can even hint at.
I don’t much recognize myself at the moment.
I see me, don’t recognize this version of me, and it’s happening in front of mainly an audience of two. That audience has had to be my right hand since January 6th of last year. They’re tired by now. I’m tired now, only chemo doesn’t care that my body wasn’t in prime shape to tolerate consensual poisoning.
That’s chemo fog.
My brain is currently being traumatized and bathed in chemicals along with my body. I feel it and acknowledging it actually removes the power of it.
The chemo ends by March 1st and that round will be the worst and last. Hopefully that round will be the last one EVER.
A month after that ends, radiation starts five days a week. My insides will be both healing and receiving more damage to a chest wall that was born with a birth defect.
I noticed I was sick, ultimately finding cancer, after my birth defect got worse at age 44.
By May or so, I’ll be just me recovering from all of it. If I start of act differently, know that chemo changes you on a cellular level. I may actually have some permanent changes or changes that take a long time to return.
Hang in with me and it’ll be very interesting; if nothing else. My story may get weird. I need to start writing because chemo brain impacts your memory and ability to take in new information without getting hit by panic.
Learning new things or having to make big decisions right now feels like nuclear science. I feel like I have the available intelligence of a college kid at Chico State during spring break after they developed a concussion.
Sometimes I stutter now. Sometimes, I can’t find the right word even if I’m holding the object in my hand and the object is a can of soup. It takes me dramatically longer to do basic tasks than it took a month ago and a month ago, I had trouble.
Thank you for loving me and reminding me to stay kind inside when my brokenness was more anger-filled and unhealed. This version of me is just mourning and has become Ten-second-Tom from 50 First Dates.
This part of me is broken, but also more whole. I am a lighthouse for misfits, but I’m also deeply diminished and struggling to find an IQ that even I found pleasant to have. That means much less now. I couldn’t remember what a straw was called yesterday.
“I don’t mind getting sick, as long as I have my mental faculties.” Who hasn’t said that? I did. Currently, I cry and it looks irrational if you haven’t been following along. I make perfect sense once you get to know me.
My last set of tears came after a sip of something with citrus. The radiating piercing in my jaw and glands made me look as ridiculous as someone sucking on a bag of War Heads.
Science has the ability to cure cancer. The tricky part is keeping the patient alive while you cure it.
Tomorrow is my birthday and I am a shameless supporter of others. It would mean so much to me if you knew how much you mean to me.
Our banters and boosts and blankets of support are the difference some days. I am not doing my best with updates, but I’m also not in a place to put much energy outward.
I ♥️ you, those who read, write, and hold me close. You sustain me.
Cancer treatments are cruel because cancer demands they be. It’s very challenging.
I hope this update helps.
Some of the bravest people you know cry significantly more than anyone thinks. I know because the more I cry, so long as I keep moving forward, the braver people seem to think I am.
Courage is not about a lack of tears. Courage often is the fear met with determination to build an oar out of your own bones, if needed, in order to row upstream from why your tears are occurring in the first place.
This is my husband who made me a cake with pink cream cheese icing and candy because all 45-year-old women need pink cakes to help kick cancer in the teeth. He has never baked me a cake before. This was such a nice present.
Queen Buttercup Speaks 