So, today I went in for my blood draw for my 3month oncology follow up. I have been feeling mildly nervous about it. I’m still doing that push the thoughts and feelings away thing. However, when I was done with my appointment, I was on the verge of tears for a good 15min. Even though the phlebotomist had to poke me in my arm and fan around and then in my hand and fan around, I know the tears weren’t due to physical pain.
It’s that buzzword: Trauma. It’s trauma I don’t want to have. It’s trauma that makes me feel weak to admit that I have. Cancer sucks. Chemo sucked. I didn’t realize how horrible chemo was until I finished and regained even just a little normalcy. As much as I was down and out through my treatment, I also felt like I was coping pretty well emotionally. Well, if you call unwillingness to allow your emotions to get mixed up in the whole process. The theme of “onward” was exactly that. I took my lessons from Elsa, “Conceal, don’t feel.” But I was so good at the ‘conceal” part that even I didn’t know what I was feeling.
What I do know is that I have scars: physical and mental. My port scar that still itches and shoots pain in my chest several times a day can easily bring me back to remembering the feeling of being connected to a pump for 48hrs. The heat that I felt. The lack of appetite. The total exhaustion. Those memories make me feel sick to my stomach, and I want to curl up into a ball and cry, but I don’t.
My neuropathy is something I just live with. It’s always there. It’s like background noise until it isn’t. It turns up the volume with moderate exercise or travel. It’s kind of like noises in my life now: the constant hum of a bathroom fan is mildly irritating, but when someone turns the fan off, the relief I feel is euphoric. If my neuropathy ever goes away, I think it may just feel like that. For now, the most frustrating part of my neuropathy is that I would like to be able to be a bit more active, but knowing that it just aggravates the tingling and burning sensations is a mighty obstacle. Even more so, since I don’t have a reliable way to make it quickly settle down.
It’s not all doom and gloom. I have much to be grateful for, and I have some things that can reliably lift my spirits:
— Seeing more musicals
— Formula 1 weekends
— Planning travel adventures
— Then the more obvious: time spent with @cleverdevil, my kiddos, my puppos, and my family group chats
And not to end on too happy of a note, all of the above is not experienced in a vacuum. I am still acutely, perhaps too intensely, aware of what’s going on in our country and around the world.
Alas, it’s a bittersweet symphony