ReachOutGiving

On June 12, 2013, I was diagnosed with a local recurrence of my breast cancer.  I have since had a lumpectomy, and begun chemotherapy (every three weeks for 1-2 years) and daily radiation treatments (for six and a half weeks). Brain scans have revealed that the cancer may have metastasized, but I must wait until November to do a follow-up scan.

I find myself feeling weighed down by everything that's going on.  I suppose it's to be expected, but it's making it so difficult to focus on my work.  And socializing has become exhausting.  I was excited to see a dear friend and celebrate the impending arrival of her newest family member at her baby shower this weekend, but I worried afterwards that I might have been dampening the mood of the event with my general malaise.  Maybe no one noticed.  It's strangely schizophrenic, to feel genuinely happy for someone and happy to see one's friends, and at the same time to feel incapable of making basic conversation, because of the constant refrain buzzing through my mind - "cancer, cancer, cancer."  I worry if I have a brain tumor, what that will mean for me.  I am exhausted by the amount of time and energy it has taken and will continue to take from me. 

Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close."  I feel lost in that strange country sometimes, and it's so difficult to find my way back to mundane conversation or to film analysis or to flea eradication. 

Siddharta Mukherjee, in The Emperor of All Maladies, makes a comparison between the struggles of some of the cancer patients he treats and Primo Levi's writings about the Holocaust.  "Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living.  The daily life of a patient becomes so intensely preoccupied with his or her illness that the world fades away."  My situation is not nearly so extreme as some, and I would argue that even theirs should not be compared to a concentration camp (at all), but I do relate to the idea of annihilation.  Often, I can feel the world fading away, and I have to grasp desperately at something - bears, surfing, horseback riding (which I never get to do, but maybe some day...), good surprises, new accessories, earl grey pie and an iced horchata latte, trips to come, Halloween haunts, Christmas craft fairs, laughter - appealing enough to bring me back to myself for a time.