When my brain is working correctly, it defaults to producing words. This is part of the reason why my loved and dear ones keep asking, “Are you journaling? You should be writing. Write everything down.”
I did finally manage to produce this blog entry, but I keep revising because I cannot find the right combination of words. You’re reading this, so I managed – but the near-constant noise inside my head doesn’t signify as communication I can share.
About three weeks ago now, my doctor called to convey the results of several tests. I don’t remember much of the actual conversation. My husband kept track of the salient facts while I cried and/or hyperventilated:
- The lump in my lymph node is not, in fact, an infection. It’s a tumor.
- The biopsy results of that tumor were positive. It’s uterine cancer.
- My father’s mother died young from some kind of cancer in her abdomen. I am 48 years old.
It doesn’t feel as if three weeks have passed, but I am losing temporality. It happened first in short bursts – during tests, scans, and appointments. The sound of doctors explaining complex, unhappy medical information has a uniquely memorable cadence. But words are not setting the tempo of this nightmare: My senses are. The clock, the calendar, and other types of measurement have ceased to be reliable for me. They help other people figure out the parts they need to play and the tasks they need to perform. They do not help me at all. Not now. Not yet.
The tumor (I am told) is just a few centimeters long, about the size of a kidney bean. My body disagrees. I have a steady hot ache just inside the cup of my right hipbone. The sensation antagonizes my intestines and blazes down the taut muscles in my lower back. Abstract knowledge does nothing to help me. My reality has already become too visceral.
I’m going to have to endure these kinds of conversations and experiences if I want to survive. I’m going to have surgery with an uncertain outcome. I’m going to have targeted radiation with a strong possibility of collateral damage. I’m going to have six rounds of chemotherapy, if my mind and body can tolerate being deliberately poisoned. Following all of that, I’m going to endure five years of smoldering worry before I’ll truly believe I’ve survived.
I think about this timeline, and all of these facts, and the gears in my conscious mind just seize up. I’ve got a type of cancer that nobody expected to find, in a place where it shouldn’t be growing. It hid, and then it migrated. One of my grandmothers fought this fight – right around this time in her life – and she lost. I try to think through all of these facts and my thoughts coagulate like jello. I try to parse each fact separately and I cannot think at all.
I am feeling this experience, full stop. Other people have the luxury of thinking it: in the end, they are removed from it. I am not. I feel alone and overwhelmed. I feel strangeness, weight, and pain in my body. I feel a volcanic depth and degree of anger I have never felt before.
I am feeling. I feel. Words are not going to be enough.
medicinal sausage 