fight cancer

it’s been a strange long melancholic month in some ways. february(s) can do that, have you hanging on to the last threads of winter whether you choose to or not. my body has been matching that mood in some ways and i hadn’t been noticing at all. then a few weeks ago i started noticing signs, symptoms that would be alarms for a cancer patient in remission. i have started noticing again physical weakness. it is strange – it could be nothing, it could be bad eating or something inane.

i’ve scheduled the doctor’s visits. i can easily navigate each and every test in this new month of march from blood tests to scans to invasive procedures but most strangely i am uncertain in my emotional navigation. i began a new journey at the beginning of last year where i woke up to a lot of things, to a lot of my life looking at the world and colors around me, looking at my hands and heart and what they are truly capable of and now i am unsure of how to navigate what used to be very easy. i used to be able to sleepwalk through something like this, like shutting your eyes to childhood violence. but i can’t anymore. i am awake and somehow this is not tragedy.

this is not an entry to scarily tempt fate or taunt the possibilities of my body. it is simply a notation that i am very awake. i’ve never quite been here before. it’s rather daunting if not the best place i could be at right now.

i have a friend whose case i continually get on to take care of herself and get some more sleep. i realized today that i have not been following my own advice. i do take care of myself. in many ways. but exercise and eating mostly better isn’t the whole picture. i have been in the past few weeks waking up extremely early in the morning, full of anxiety about meeting life goals and being sustainable. if i am truly going to put this, “fight cancer,” as a goal then i have to work on it all, my head included. i have been thinking about taking fight cancer off my list and combining it with live without fear because in the end, for me, a lot of it comes down to that.

i possess an indescribable fear of many things as do we all. one of those fears is that i’ll wake up one day with my cancer back and i will have to face it again, the possibility of what that will mean for me and my future and the fear of doing chemotherapy again.

I realize how much fear I have been carrying inside of me. The panic, the fear of I need to do this and I need to do that before BEFORE…whatever it is that may happen is pretty intense. It’s not exclusive to cancer patients or cancer survivors or to MS patients or to the “sick.” I think it encompasses a broader community, what Richard Rodriguez calls the community of the wounded. Emotional or physical scars, you know? Which means mostly all of us. It’s not about being sick….does that make sense?

What I am trying to say before I get too far tangential and paragraphs in is that the panic, the living each day like it’s your last isn’t going to work. so i guess this goes under my multiple goals, live without fear, live each day like it’s my first and not my last and fight cancer.

here is the richard rodriguez quote that i will, goal wise, internally tattoo. Let me say, again, that I believe this in emotional and physical terms…..

“…the wounded. I had never experienced a broken body before. My body was—I have a peasant’s body which is reliable, not graceful but strong and I could take it for granted. And, suddenly, I was wounded. And suddenly, the doctor says to you after the operation, “It looks good,” or something, “It looks promising. Come back in six months, and then again in six months, and then again in six months.” And so far, it looks good.

But, I tell friends of mine, that I will always belong on the other side of the river now. I will always belong with the nation of the wounded because what I saw when I was there, is how easy it is to change one’s place in this world, to change one’s passport and to belong with them. When I see people who are injured or in wheelchairs now, or people who are obviously sick, I feel one of them now. Even though my body is apparently healed, I feel also psychologically wounded. “