Well – of Mine.
“Due to illness” my appointment to get the pathology results from the surgeon was put off a day, so I read the report on my digital file. At the very first meeting, when they told us that I had cancer, they also said: don’t read the reports posted in your online medical journal. The nurse said that even she didn’t understand them. I get that. But I also am a jerk who will take on any kind of challenge when I feel patronized. I am not a doctor – or even a nurse – and I do recognize their expertise – but there are things that I do understand and am immensely curious about. And I don’t fly off the handle and catastrophize. At least not emotionally. I like having a sense of realistic alternative possibilities: My biggest fear is being ambushed.
I wasn’t ambushed by breast cancer. I have had several suspicious bumps and knots over the years. A biopsy in my 30s. I felt like the seesaw was evenly stacked: no family history of cancer that I knew of, a healthy lifestyle – and on the other end – a human body. When I found this new lump, I knew it was 50/50 in the sense that it was or wasn’t. When I first heard that it was, it kind of felt inevitable, actually. Hindsight is a very strange thing. I think because we want so much for our lives to “make sense”. Like a carefully-crafted story.
My cancer story is on the online medical journal. Every nurses note, every pathological report. I’m still not good at skim-reading Norwegian, so I missed the two words at the top of the epicrisis report for my lumpectomy, and found the “resultater” section and wound up reading the details of the findings in the tissue samples. I saw the measurements of the cancer-free margins around the tumors (3 tumors – surprise! – not 2). One edge was below the desired 2mm. The rest were clear. The bit of text I had missed at the top of the page was: clear margins. If I had read that, I could have saved myself a lot of math.
Still, I wasn’t certain what the surgeon would want to do regarding the skimpy margin. I wasn’t sure about some of the details regarding cancer in the lymph nodes (in 2 of the 9 that were removed) and in the lymph vessels. After actually getting cancer, it is the M word – not the C word – that is terrifying. Has it metastasized? I did know that having cancer in that second lymph node changed the relevant statistics for a 5-year survival rate. By quite a bit.
I had some questions for the surgeon. And I had no doubt he had things to say to me.
Despite the unknowns, my anxiety took a step down. I talked to Egil about what the report said and then realized that maybe he isn’t like me. Maybe he would rather wait and get all the information at once. He has quite the poker face, so if that were the case, he’d never let on. And he would never shush me. He reminded me that I wasn’t supposed to read the reports, but then pointed out the ridiculousness of telling me not to read them.
That night I went to a function at the cancer center in the city for a makeup demonstration (How to Make Eyebrows from Scratch). I met another woman experiencing her third round of breast cancer. She brought it up several times and I hurt so much because I wasn’t brave enough to open myself then and there and invite her to tell me more about it. Not that night, especially. I felt – and still feel -bad about it. On the other hand, she is a vibrant, beautiful woman in her 60s. Her energy makes it just the tiniest bit less frightening. The tiniest bit.
Yesterday the surgeon told me the margins were acceptable. The cancer cells in the lymph vessels were the reason for radiation. Nothing to worry about, my prognosis is still good. Most of the doctors don’t say “cured”, but cancer-free. There will always be a risk of recurrence. There are always cancer cells circulating around the body. The immune system kills most of them. At the moment I am cancer free.
He said I could celebrate.
I bombarded him with questions about the research around various things like Intermittent Fasting, Plastics, Alcohol…
Exercise, he said. He said it several times – for several reasons – exercise is the best thing I can do. “Get strong and build muscle!”
I am not going to write here about the choices I am making regarding other, controversial, tactics people take to try to avoid recurrence. The research is always contradictory, and even when it isn’t people will make it controversial. I do not want to – even indirectly – give advice when people’s lives on are the line.
“If it were me,” is a thought experiment. An academic exercise. It is different when there are actual consequences. I’m probably repeating myself.
Maybe it bears repeating.
This morning I woke up in pain again. But it is getting better every day. The swelling is going down and I can fold clothes without uttering a stream of obscenities, and still stay awake the rest of the day. I can do a lot of things that I haven’t done in what seems like ages.
Seven months.
This isn’t over. Egil and I talked about it this morning while he was getting ready for work. I still have at least 3 weeks of radiation to go, and there’s not way to predict how it will effect me. But tired is not sick and moaning, I said.
Whenever I mention Egil here on the blog, I ask his permission. I may be comfortable with TMI, but I try to draw a line when it comes to respecting the privacy of the people I love. I am not going through this alone. I have said that it is lonely – and it is. It is difficult to watch Egil head off to work five days a week and not envy him. I may be an introvert, I may hate small talk, and I may actually suck at it, but I still need it. Egil is an extrovert. All this time stuck at home with me can’t be easy. Since I never get out, he is subjected to my stream-of-cancer-consciousness monologues. If I could do it all again, I would put signs all over the house: Shut up, Ren. He never said shut up. He never walked out of the room. He was actively present.
Not to mention that he tore down and rebuilt our rotting deck, repaired our refrigerator at least 8 times before buying a new one, did all of the laundry and nearly all of the cleaning – including a deep clean after Leonard stepped in his own poop outside and then wandered around the the living room unnoticed. (And here we have a whole other category of TMI.)
I’d bet that the most annoying thing for him was my whining about being annoying and useless.
We ate take out for months.
I wouldn’t have you think for a moment that I’m any kind of gender-role-stereotypical wife. Or that my husband has suddenly “stepped up” to do housework now. Not at all. Laundry and cleaning are nothing new to him.
He just doesn’t like to cook.
And no one should have to pull the barge alone. He did. With a whining little oxpecker on his neck the whole time.
The full measure of my gratitude for him is… not possible to express and certainly a private shared set of emotions.
And it’s not over. This is the peripeteia. The point in the story where everything turns. It is the apex of the drama, where things slide towards a new kind of normal. What follows is all denouement. A theater lecturer once described it as the part after the final commercial break of a sitcom. The reassuring little bit to let us know life goes on.
I know it may not be that easy. The side effects of radiation aren’t predictable. I see already that, while I thought my nails had made it through chemo, my toenails are now falling off. Surprises keep coming.
But in terms of symmetry: there were the retrospective cancer-free 57 years, the breast cancer (1 known and 2 stealth buggers), and this is the new cancer-free part of the story it resolves at least one theme of the bigger story.
A few months ago I heard a podcast about narrative psychology. They talked about how it matters where you start and end a story. Where we choose to do that, how we frame our experiences, makes a big difference in how we handle the potential trauma, and how we create meaning in (and I would say with) our lives.
As always I retain the right to change to reframe all of this.
Finding My Bearings Now 