I keep thinking, when I feel better, must be when there are longer spaces between each outpouring. And yet there aren’t.
The truth is, I’m struggling. I’m struggling to put meaning to things, I’m struggling for anything to make sense. I don’t feel like emotionally I’m getting better or coping better at all. Today, the medication caused tingling, strong tingling in my chest, throat, arms and legs. Stronger than it’s been at any point in time, since the first week. I had not felt such tingling for months. Maybe it was because I was anxious over the day, my godsister came and took me out to lunch, she is a sweetheart. The place was outdoors, a side table on the pavement outside a bakery, so between my hot flashes and the people walking by every few minutes, and walking through a hawker centre to get there, I was a nervous wreck, unable to string a sentence together, or remember halves of one.
I tried to help my dad colour his hair. I tried to make a pie. It feels surreal to make a pie when you can’t even walk in the street without being hunched over. Surreal to make a pie when you’re going to be in surgery and cut off part of your body. I read a Tom Clancy book furiously over the first part of the day as if the vicious, murderous spy story would make any difference to my life or would quell the feeling of being sick in my stomach. I watched the old romantic comedy with Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz and the emotions just pained me, where the most sad it would get is heartbreak. I couldn’t think whether I would ever watch a movie and feel like a normal person again. The Jude Law character was a widower with two little girls, falling in love with a new blonde. It hurt. Everything hurts.
Jude Law doesn’t have cancer, and neither does Cameron Diaz, nor do stars, athletes, or Bill Gates and not at this age. No, they got to enjoy their time, youth, and mind. Jude Law has a teenage son and Bill Gates is losing hair. All the potential that now feels lost to me.
I lay down with my tiredness and my mind drifted back to when I was diagnosed and I wondered why I was so calm, why I didn’t scream in my gynecologist’s office, save me Dr Nair. I remembered being in the bed when they told us after the first IVF that despite ten follicles, there was only one egg retrieved and how I cried for days. My heart over the last few years has been broken and put in the blender so many times that I can’t stand it. I was strong. I was strong so we kept going. How can I be strong some more. Where am I going to find that strength, why is life and God doing this to me? I don’t want to be that strong, or have to be strong anymore. I don’t want people around me, my family, to have to be this strong and cheerful.
I don’t even remember some things. But I remember others. I want to write it down. How I had an anxiety attack and felt vertigo, walking through a hawker centre, with Suling. How my skin isn’t healing and I get dark spots and scars all over my legs and hands. How I cried today, because Richard, my big boss, was almost in tears when mentioning that I was sick, at the work retreat. Richard is tough and strong and macho and an alpha male. His response when I told him, was the most practical, confident and sturdy. The thought of that frightens me, although it should inspire me with his compassion.
I don’t want to fight. Fighting is exhausting, and I don’t understand why my body decided to do this to itself. But there’s nothing else that I can do. You can’t not carry on and carrying on, is fighting. I don’t know that I will ever get on a plane again, that I will ever walk in the same countries I used to be carefree in, that I will feel whole and not scarred, that I will ever sleep a night without being awoken by some kind of horrible hot flash. I’ve never even had surgery in my life, and I feel so unprepared by life, for this.
