It’s been less than a week since I’ve been diagnosed with colon cancer. While I have some testing to get done before surgery, I am currently in somewhat of a waiting game. Currently surgery is scheduled for December 18th, about 7 weeks from diagnosis. That is long time to be walking around knowing you have cancer but not doing anything about it. Physically I feel fine. Minimal pain, if any. A little bit of fatigue, but not much more than I’ve had in the past. Our family has taken a long weekend to process and love on each other while also sticking to our regular routine. Waking up to let the dogs out, driving the kids to activities, watching our shows, cheering on our favorite F1 teams and drivers. Those are the motions. How have those things changed?
I wake up each morning remembering I have cancer. I start to panic a bit, but I remind myself that we have a path to treatment; I just need to be patient. I drive Colette to theater and feel a slight pain in my abdomen, “That must mean the cancer has spread.” I watch a tv show with Jonathan and I have a headache, “Oh no, it has spread to my brain or I have brain cancer in addition to colon cancer.” My hip hurts while sleeping and I think, “I must have bone cancer. That’s why we are finding colon cancer. It can’t be as easy as a surgery to fix this. There must be more.” For someone with medical anxiety prior to diagnosis, these thoughts are fairly routine, but now they have a twist and the guise of being more rational. Most of those thoughts are not rational even with this diagnosis, but it’s hard to convince my brain of that.
Will I settle into this normal for the next 7 weeks? I’ll let you know.