Why I Wanted to Start Blogging Again

Cancer.  Unless it's your astrological sign it's a very scary word to hear from your doctor.  Yet it was the word spoken to me back in March 2012.  I sat there in some odd state of disbelief as I listened to her over the phone.  After we hung up, I immediately texted or called mom with the results.  I was in a very hazy mood and couldn't really pay attention to what was going on around me.  I remember her coming home from work earlier then she was supposed to, and after that it was just a blur of things I can't recall.

The things I can remember before that call was that I was clearly sick.  Yet I woke up each morning and forced myself to go to work.  No way was I gonna let something seemingly insignificant hold me back.  I remember having a lot of back pain, similar to one I'd had before and wrote it off as just another episode.  I was barely eating at one point, nothing would stay down.  I can vividly recall my coworkers being upset by how pale I looked to them.  My manager asking if she should call for an ambulance.  I insisted that it was fine, I'd just have my mom come pick me up and leave the car over night.

Funny how you can convince yourself of these things, and yet on the inside you know you're wrong.  After two visits to urgent care, and an official visit with my doctor.  I was told a few different things. One thought it was just a bad UTI infection, the other that it was likely just the flu. I would have happily accepted either one of those.  My doctor was the one who nailed it.  Cancer, a word that I never expected to hear.  At least not that I had it.  To me that was not a word that a girl my age should hear.  In fact, I've heard over and over from different doctors and nurse since that day that I was way to young to have it.  That endometrial cancer, was not something a then 33 year old girl would get.  How wrong they were.  I had it, and by the time we found it I was already Stage IV and had moved on to my lungs.

Since then I have gone through several rounds of chemotherapy.  Had a complete hysterectomy, followed up by more chemo just to make sure nothing was lurking.  Then I was supposedly free and clear to go back to my life and enjoy it.  It was almost six months after that before I felt well enough to work again.  Started a new job that I loved.  Life seemed to be looking up.  Yet in the back of my mind my oncologists reminder that, if it came back we'd be looking at an uncureable cancer.  Yeah, I didn't even want to think about it.  Six months later, I was proven to be wrong.  It was back, growing happily in my lungs without a care in the world.

It was back to more chemotherapy.  More fighting to get my life back under my control, not some stupid disease.  Then of course as they say, the shit hit the fan.  I started having a bad reaction to one of my drugs.  Tried to desensitize me to it, and that worked for a bit.  However, that didn't last long and we moved on to a similar drug in the same family that was tolerated a bit better.  That lasted for a bit, and then problem child that I am, I became allergic to that drug as well.  I can't even count how many ER trips and hospital stays I've had in the last five years, but it's more then I ever wanted to deal with.

After that there was more chemo drugs, a bit of radiation for a tumor that collapsed a part of my right lung.  Pulmonary embolisms, which have brought me the eternal joy of being on a blood thinner for the rest of my life. A round of a new chemo drug, that did absolutely nothing at all.  The next one though, that one was the one that woke my sorry self up.  I was told before we started that it could drop my blood counts a bit.  Oh no, this puppy damn near tried to kill me! It crashed every little thing it could, and I was back in the ER again.  Followed by a lovely stay in the ICU where things went from bad to worse and I scared the living heck out of my family.

Prior to that, even though I was fully aware that I had a terminal cancer, that yes I would eventually die.  The key word there being eventually, I still believed that somehow, some way I was going to get better.  That I'd get lucky and go into remission and it would just stay that way.  Wishful thinking at its finest.  Nope, that hope died a very, very sad death.  Somewhere in that ICU, I lost myself for a bit and couldn't even tell you what happened.  It was like I had blacked out or was having some crazy drug induced dream.  Which isn't surprising because they had me on so many different things trying to figure out what was wrong.

By the time I came out of that, my pretty little dream of remission was dead.  Clarity smacked me in the face and I knew, actually knew that my days of thinking it's gonna get better were long gone.  I was gonna die, and that was that.  Not a pretty thing to wake up to.  I didn't take it to well and I can't imagine many people could.  Listening to the parade of doctors who were looking over me at that point was torture.  There was no sugar coating at all, something I'm grateful for now, not so much then.  Yes, I cried.  I was 38 years old and dying.  I was going to be leaving my mom and family behind and I just could not even begin to accept that.  It wasn't fair at all!

That month I spent in the hospital, first the ICU and then up on the cancer ward made me do a lot of thinking.  Was I even gonna get out of the hospital? Was I gonna die without ever getting to sleep in my own bed again? Who was going to take care of mom for me? So many questions ran through my head every moment of every day.  Every single one of them made me mad.  I was eventually deemed well enough to me moved to a Transitional Care Unit for rehab so I could be moved home.  That was another month of torture.  Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and more stupid questions running through my head.

The only upside to this was that, I was still here, still living.  Did that mean there was still hope?  Probably not, at least not the same hope of some divine intervention that I had been believing in before.  This was different, this was me and all that anger that had built up because of those questions.  There was no way I was giving up this fight! I was going to fight tooth and nail for every day I could get.  I was not backing down, and I was not gonna be pulled off the stage until I was damn good and ready to leave.

Here I am, today...still fighting.  I am not actively getting treatment any more for my cancer.  No more visits to the oncologist.  Currently I'm in the wonderful hands of the Hospice team.  Fighting to gain back as much strength as I can to keep on fighting.  Some days it's easy, and some not so much.  I get frustrated with myself constantly for not being able to do the simple things that I know my body was once capable of.  I'm still a stubborn brat and think I can soldier through things without asking for help.  I learning though or at least trying to.  For now, even though it's not easy for me I do my best to just take one day at a time.  Each day I wake up and the first thing I do is thank God for letting me have another day.