This cancer journey is an odd one. When I started this blog last November, I had just finished radiation the month before. We had a “Remission Accomplished” party, and I felt joyful to have treatment behind me.
I also, however, felt a little frustration. So many well-meaning friends/loved ones seemed so eager to be finished with cancer — they had asked me throughout treatment when I’d be “done” with it as if it were a course of antibiotics that would be the end of my illness once and for all. And part of me wanted to tell them that I wouldn’t be “done” with cancer any sooner than another trauma victim might be “done” with their experience. Chemotherapy, Radiation, Surgery … they all dispel the physical part of cancer. But the emotional impact lingers … it leaves marks on the spirit. It is a trauma of sorts. And I guess I wasn’t eager for all of the love and support to evaporate like the regular doctor visits had.
It’s the strangest thing. While going through treatment, you get accustomed to weekly — sometimes even daily — visits to the doctor’s office, where a whole team dedicated to keeping you alive waits to measure your every function and feeling, and to help you through. Of course a whole lot of that becomes tedious and wearisome … but some of it is affirming. It feels good to have a team of people so concerned with your well-being. So while I dreaded — even sometimes cried over — all the needle sticks, and the cold, bone chilling toxins pumped through my veins, and the nausea, the breath-taking bone pain, the radiation burns, and the crushing fatigue of treatment — I liked seeing my nurses. We became a sort of family. And I felt a loss when I ceased to see them regularly.
Maybe that’s why I felt defensive when I felt my friends and relatives also pulling away. I knew that they — for very good reason — wanted to be finished with cancer — but I wasn’t yet. And I felt a bit dismissed.
I’ve since read articles and books about other women’s similar experiences — about depressions setting in when it was all over — depressions when the world expected rejoicing. Because, what wasn’t immediately apparent to anyone, even ourselves, was that while we were doing treatment, we were surviving. We were mobilized. We had a fight to fight, and a team to help us with it. But when the fight ended and we sought to recover our previous lives, and to let our guards down … well, the flood of emotions, the changed outlook on life having faced our own deaths, the sudden loss of our support systems … that was overwhelming too.
So I found myself craving what I had previously shunned: the company of other “survivors” who understood and could affirm my own experience. While I had at first disdained the whole “survivor” community as victim-types who wanted to hold on to cancer as an identity, I now understood that, as one who has beaten cancer (for now), one becomes, like it or not, part of a community that understands things others can’t. And I wanted that ready camaraderie.
So I went to breast cancer seminars, I reached out to “survivor” running groups, and support groups … I started a blog.
And then, almost over night, and much to my surprise, I didn’t want to think or talk about cancer anymore. Suddenly I was finished. I could feel my old/normal life start to feel comfortably familiar again, and cancer started to become part of the past that didn’t hold me anymore.
Cut to today: it’s 8 months after my first and only “cancer conqueror” blog post, and I realize that I’ve just experienced another piece of the journey: the letting go piece. The moving on piece.
I had been feeling guilty for not posting here until I realized that distancing from my cancer experience was yet another valid — and likely healthy — part of my own journey.
Yet I don’t think the fact that I’m back now indicates any sort of relapse. It just means I’m ready now. I’m ready to talk about it again — not to dwell, or complain, or mourn — just to share experience, strength, and hope from this new perspective.
There have been so many gifts through the whole journey — gifts that remain now the cancer has gone.
Let’s talk about them!
