I swam yesterday, the first time in months. It cooled me down, it took my mind off everything, and for half an hour, I thought of nothing. It felt amazing. It was also very tiring and my heart rate was averaging 130 bpm for several hours later in the afternoon, although I felt ok, just that I could tell my heart was pounding hard.
I took a Xanax last night and slept from 10:30 pm to 4:30 am. I woke up, as I always do, with my head sweating from hot flashes and with my legs aching. Maybe this is my new reality.
I woke up and still a wave of sadness crashed over me. And I get it. I do. There is no point in being sad. You don’t have control over anything but your attitude. There is no point right now in thinking about plans because you have to live every day and keep taking comfort from that.
But when you are young, there is a natural hope and joy and desire to be happy. And, yes, I understand there is no point in being anxious or worried. You don’t have to enjoy everything but you have to be stoic, to see it as a way to live on. As a means to an end.
But you know, you are sad. I get why people in this situation can’t sleep and watch happy videos or funny videos, just for laughs, to feel happier, or like something is funny. Because your heart really does ache and I don’t think anyone can tell you that it stops aching. You can be cheerful about it, but of course, it pains you when you look at other people. For me, I see my husband lying next to me and I know I’m supposed to feel grateful. And it’s not that I’m not grateful. I am, in a million ways. But it also feels like my heart is being ripped out of my breast. Hopefully, in time, this will come.
In the quiet of the morning, seeing him hurts. I was so used to an absence of a child for so long, that hurts for me too. The oddity of it, the strangeness of our story playing out, how do you not see it as a compromise? How do you embrace it, as your story, your life when it is so far from the dreams you had just months ago? I’m grateful for that, but of course, it will pain you. How do you heal?
During the day, you might be able to say, ‘well it’s interesting, at least’ or say ‘oh well, it is what it is’ but in the quiet waking hours, you are sad and it hurts. And maybe one day I will wake up and think what a wonderful new day and that’s it.
How do people find significance and meaning in this suffering, this thing that your body has decided to have? I guess some find that in God, or their children. For there to be some promise in time and the future and not just a shadow of what you had or the shadow of a length you thought you had.
I understand where we are. But when you feel like you are making the best of it, how do you not see it as just good enough, but great? How do you see it all as choices, when you didn’t really have a choice in the starting point of a new life? How do you choose to be cheerful, joyful and happy?
Other people around you share this sadness, especially your family, but the whole of it, is yours alone. Your confidence to function returns with your physical strength, it’s the meaning of it that fails you. This pressure of more time, what do you do with it? Living life in the moment. How do you simultaneously pray to God to help you live without expectation and ask him to give you more time?
What does that mean when you are so young, that so many things you want to do, and which haven’t even been started? When you are a young woman, you have less to hold on to.
I understand now why I reacted so badly to Angie asking me to join Julia for yoga several times a week, or not wanting to hang out with Kelly or meet up with the breast cancer foundation counsellor or the lady survivors from the breast cancer foundation. Yes, it’s because the counsellor’s story of diagnosis at 32 and then relapse in two years and taking herself off the medication and not checking now, scared me terribly. It’s also because when you are already so sad, it is very hard to deal with other people’s sadness or be sad for them. It’s like piling feeling upon feeling. I understand life is transient, I know it is. But emotionally, while I know my life is transient, I don’t want to be told this by someone whose mantra is life is transient, or look at them and think it of them and myself. It doesn’t help me function.
I understand why my mind is confused. It’s because I can’t feel forward, I realized this yesterday when Dad was changing a faucet on a tap in Weyren and Serene’s apartment because you change a tap with the expectation that it will make a difference, it will be used. It is doing something forward. It was a very strange thing for me to grasp. I can understand doing what needs to be done right now, or for today, but this concept of time is really confusing right now. It’s like when people talk about how traffic should be, I don’t know what to say. I don’t care. Or some items in the news, or someone else is getting married or engaged. In your mind, you understand the concept, but in your mind and heart, it doesn’t register anything because it’s in the future. This is why I’m particularly worried about my job, because living in the moment, for the present, has to be the antithesis of investment and company or financial analysis. And because it involves making decisions, which I’m really bad at right now.
It’s like watching the world from behind a glass. At the same time, you feel like many things are useless. I wanted to throw out the hair dye and sanitary pads I have, for example, because you wouldn’t need them for years. I guess this is why I feel really weird when people send flowers or tea. It’s really hard to find significance in things and all risks feel imminent. It’s hard not to have anxiety and not to see the unlikely as very likely when something very unlikely has happened to you. People think they understand the black swan idea, but they have no idea until you are the black swan and it is actually really hard to live this way.
Another thing I realize is that I completely, totally, entirely underestimated the fear of death. It is huge, I don’t care how prepared you think you are, how chosen you are or how blessed you are. It is huge. I have fear about eating chicken or chicken soup, I have fear about eating sugar, I have fear about receiving flowers. It permeates everything. You make a call to customer service, and it feels weird, why would you be calling customer service, what does it matter? You can’t speak normally about what the banking issue is, you want to scream I have Cancer at them and of course, they don’t care. Your friend tells you about a promotion track and you are trying to relate or make sense of it and you feel a blunted sense of happiness for them, but you can’t understand it. The world is going on outside and always without you and it doesn’t make sense. It makes it impossible to function, you live like you are already dead. It makes your gut constantly feel sick, your mind anxious and your throat feel totally hollow.
Right now I feel in limbo, like until I finish treatment, my plans, rejoining the living world, doesn’t quite matter, because I don’t know where or if I am. And maybe this is always kind of going to be the case. Logically, you will always, especially as a young person, experience difficulty making plans. I cannot believe that this experience doesn’t leave you changed, that you aren’t risk-averse. I understand why so many people who go through this experience move house or simplify to a safer, smaller place.
In particular though, because of the extended nature of neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, the long months that it gives you to anticipate surgery, or risks, or the recurring reminder pain at the tumour site, right now I don’t know what to do with the thoughts. You can’t look back and think, because that’s not going to help and it’s a sorry, traumatic story. But then your mind is caught between should-haves and what-ifs and it gets paralyzed and confused between the two.
You are told to focus on the present, the physical treatment, treating yourself well, and taking care of the things that need to medically happen. Things like eating, walking, and going for treatment. But your brain doesn’t govern eating. It may say Eat and then you eat. But that takes a millisecond. What do you do with the remaining hours of the day? You don’t really know what to do and doing anything doesn’t seem particularly significant without anyone else there to pull you through doing something together, there is very little motivation to do anything at all.
I walked out in the morning, and it felt better. I busied myself with other things, so I didn’t have to think. But it is there, all the time, looming, present and large. And this is in the good week when I feel the least amount of physical symptoms. Oh boy.
