I’ve been trying to write this blog entry for the better part of three months – not because the news is bad, but because it’s good. That probably doesn’t make sense unless you’ve also been a passenger on this particular rollercoaster-from-hell. So, please, bear with me while I try to explain.
At the beginning of treatment, Steve and I were told that chemotherapy was considered, universally, harder to endure than radiation. At the end of chemo, the doctors and infusion nurses and even the schedulers told me I had weathered that storm with incredible success: The second amazing success out of three stages. I was batting very well.
Soon after my last blog entry, something from chemo caught up to me and/or the side effects from radiation kicked in with a vengeance. Or, both. Either way, I ended up in the hospital for several days. To be more specific, I ended up in the cancer ward for several days. I’ve been hospitalized in the past for other reasons, for similar stretches of time. Those stays were different.
In the past, each time I’ve been admitted for in-patient care, I believed without question – and therefore without discussion – that I was hospitalized in order to heal. I also believed that the other patients around me were also in the hospital so they could heal, too. That was not my experience on the oncology ward. That part of the hospital is the place where very sick people, people without hope, go to die.
I can articulate that thought now, several months in hindsight. At the time, I didn’t have words: I had facts and I had reactions. The front/conscious part of my brain kept telling me I was young. I was cancer-free, technically speaking. I had good doctors. I could eat. I could walk around unassisted. I was fine. Unlike everyone else around me, also dressed in a hospital gown, I was fine.
The hind/subconscious part of my brain did not concur. The smell of that ward triggered a fear response, making the hairs on the backs of my arms stand up. I would zone for indistinct stretches of time, before I realized that I was gritting my teeth for no discernible reason. I felt I was in danger and that I should go.
I’m also reasonably certain that two people died while I was there, because of subtle ways the background ‘music’ changed. I heard a specific sound – twice – that cut through all the other computerized/mechanical alerts as if it was the only aural cue at that frequency or pitch. It would sound out for a time, urgent but only medium loud, before going abruptly silent. For the first few nights after I was discharged, I woke myself up because I was either hearing that sound in my dreams or not hearing it any longer.
I was, however, allowed to go home eventually. I should have rolled off into the sunset in a wheelchair but I couldn’t make myself be so passive. I wobbled all the way to the elevator as fast as my shaky legs could take me, as if I had something to prove. Which, I did. Some part of me did. Some deep-down part of my brain – the part that was convinced I was in danger – took over my lower body and propelled me out of that building under my own power. I’ve been thinking back to that moment and that feeling for months, and I don’t know how else to explain what it was.
So: now it’s early September. Radiation finished at the end of May. I spent all of June and July, and most of August, riding out the intestinal aftermath. I didn’t document that time because I felt tongue-tied and also, oddly, I think I did not feel confident about dropping an end bracket around the treatment part of this experience. Something happened to me during that hospital stay, something that made me feel like I had to feel horrible in order to be fighting off the cancer successfully. By that logic, if I don’t feel horrible anymore, then I’m not fighting.
Except, I am.
Now the fight is different. It’s not about listening for indications that failure is still somehow on the horizon. Now it’s about finding a new equilibrium while knowing the sound of cancer – the presence of cancer – is still out there. I don’t quite know how to describe that kind of urge to struggle, either, but I feel it. I know that I’ve survived. Now I feel a compulsion, a need, to live.
medicinal sausage 