Life in the Slow Lane

Life in the Slow Lane

Thursday, March 17, 2005

SHIT!!!!!

Ok guys. I just got very bad news today. My cancer is waaaay worse than we thought. It is official - chemo is in my very near future. The scope of this suckage is quite beyond me right now. I have cried today. I will continue to cry today and possibly cry for a while longer. I am actually not a big crier. Yes, I sniffle over animal cruelty and sentimental shit but I very rarely cry over stuff in my life. I hate crying and try to avoid it at all costs. But today I am going to give myself a break and let the weep fest begin. I am not going to be strong right now because I will have to be strong later and I only have so much to go around right now.

I cannot believe that I have to go through this. I honestly thought I might just get away with a near miss. Some tanning on the radiation bed and off I go. It is so not the case. My surgeon gave me a photocopy of my lab results and they are very difficult to understand. But what I can get from it is that the rather large piece of tissue she removed from my body is practically ALL CANCER! I hope those words I actually do understand are wrong about this but that’s what seems to be the case. 9 out of the 13 lymph nodes are positive for cancer. NINE!! This so sucks. It appears that this cancer has been around for a while.

The surgeon looked at me and said that we were expecting this. I said NO! I was not expecting this! I was told this was a small area! She went through my past test results again and got a puzzled look on her face that aptly told me that, yes, in fact all indications were pointing towards early detection of a very small cancerous area. Actually all but one of early tests indicated NO CANCER AT ALL! Nope. All those tests were very wrong. I was supposed to be the patient that was going to be fine.

Here is some good news. The blood tests they did prior to my surgery showed no cancer markers at all. That means that there is probably no serious cancer elsewhere in my body. My X-ray was clear as well so no tumours in my lungs. This is good news. And I am grasping onto this info with all my might. My surgeon also said this is still curable. And that is good news too. Yet far too little good news overall.

My doc looked at me and told me that I can do this meaning the chemo. I said that I HAD to do this. But I soooo don’t want to do this. I’d really rather being doing a whole lot of other stuff instead of chemo. Even other nasty stuff. Chemo scares the shit out of me. But then I hear people say that somebody they know went through chemo and felt fine. Or didn’t loose their hair. Or never missed a day of work. But those things always seem to happen to somebody else. But then I thought that about cancer too and now I am that somebody.

I have to say that I am trying hard not to get a hate-on going but I am starting to see a really fucked up pattern here. I have good times and bad times and inevitably when the good times start getting very good then crap starts to fall from the sky and I am completely without an umbrella. I have always had a really difficult time with work and finding that career that I think I can do every day. I have had a couple near misses when I thought I’d found that perfect job only to find that it was an illusion. Just recently I literally got an epiphany about my perfect career and it was a good idea. In fact it was a great idea that could really provide financial security and not suck my soul dry. Of course that is now on the back burner for a while. And time is of the essence with this idea. I have also had loads of problems with depression and anxiety for ages. I have been trying different meds for years hoping to stumble upon the perfect potion. I have not been successful so far with that and have had lots of bad side effects with this experimentation. The most obvious being the 50 lbs I gained one month. But now I have found that I can do OK without any meds at all. So what happens? I have cancer – something to get really bummed out about. AND of course I am going to need chemo because I just spent a load of money on a frickin’ hair straightener and for once in my frickin’ life my hair looks good. Not to mention that I am only 36 years old! HOLY SHIT! The universe is a big bully and I am going to tell!

I know, you don’t have to tell me that I need a positive attitude, blah blah blah, but I am just going to be a little bit BITTER RIGHT NOW!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

oh, crap. I'm just reading this now, a few days late, sorry. super crap. How are you?

love,
mrs b