I’m trying to keep busy and keep myself positive and relaxed. I’m not sure why so much anxiety builds up but it does seem to. So I just have to tackle it as it comes. I tell myself some different things when I can remember. I wrote these down, so that I can read it to myself when I don’t remember. I tell myself do not fear, you are going to be ok, you just have to walk through this. Don’t beat yourself up. Put yourself first. The body functions at a higher cellular level when you’re relaxed. Stop trying to please everyone. No self-criticism. Don’t compare, inner scorecard. Don’t give the negative energy, open up your heart. I also tell myself that cancer is just a growth that is unwanted, it has shrunk 80% and surgery will get rid of all of it. It will all be out and gone. We will be done and I will be cancer-free, I won’t have cancer, I will have had cancer and I can be healthy.
Since Monday, I slept without taking anything. I’m not sure I got great sleep, because I think I drifted in and out of sleep all night and sometimes it felt like I was awake but I think I did sleep and my dreams were at least not breast cancer related. They weren’t nice dreams, but they weren’t bad dreams and I don’t remember them. So that’s a step in the right direction.
I can’t pretend it is easy. Several times a day, the anxiety rises. Often, you meet someone, anyone really, and they ask you about treatment and you get reminded. Pretty much you can get reminded by anything and everything. Sometimes the thoughts and memories are really bad. But there are also longer hours that I am relaxed and not thinking about it. And for that I am grateful and hopeful.
Yesterday, we had lunch with the Ong cousins. I was a little nervous, I hadn’t seen some of them for many months and they looked at me a lot. I remembered that Hsin Mei told me before, her sister wanted to have kids but didn’t want to do any fertility treatments because their mother had cancer and I felt foolish and more anxious. It felt like it was taking a lot of concentration and work to relate to the conversation or laughter. I took a quarter of a Xanax, was relaxed at lunch and for most of the day. Zhan told me, well they look at you because they are concerned that you are ok and you are, so I have to think of it that way, people are just concerned and it will go away over time.
I went recently to Pooja’s new place, they moved. It’s strange how now that seems to throw me, I wouldn’t have thought twice before about this kind of thing but I think it’s because I feel like a lot has changed, or rather the world moves on and so quickly, and I’ve been so immersed in trying to do what I have to do and been doing, that it takes me longer to adjust to a notion of change that I would have just quickly dismissed or accepted before. At the end, I drove her to the childcare to pick up Annika, and I saw Tanya and her husband walking to pick up their kid from the same place.
I don’t know why I started, I think because we’re the same age, and she’s one of the people who has always had a little of this effect on me. Growing up I felt like I was big and awkward to her assured pretty and petite and although I really loved her for it but I always felt a bit out of place too. Then she got married and had a kid in quick succession and here they were, walking breezy into childcare in the middle of the day and here I was again, feeling really doubtful and insecure, thinking that Pooja has her life and Tanya has her life and none of them are like me, it really happened to me, why am I me, how did this happen, what am I going to do, what’s going to happen to me. And I looked away, because I didn’t want her to see me. I didn’t want to explain or talk, I didn’t want to know what she was thinking, but I also was trying to tell myself, it’s ok. Yes, this has happened. You have a different life. Everyone has different issues, inner scorecard, not external scorecard. You never know what will happen, you have a wonderful husband and you’ll have good times and maybe we’ll have a family or maybe we won’t, it’s ok. Don’t be self-critical, you don’t have to fear, after treatment you will be healthy too. Don’t give the negative energy, open up your heart. It was really hard but I think it kind of worked. I didn’t tell Zhan I saw her, which is a start and I forgot I did, afterward. I forgot which day I had gone to Pooja’s house.
This morning when I woke up, my mind kind of landed on going to Auntie Joyce’s house for yoga and how Uncle Tony’s first wife, Auntie Jo had died of breast cancer. And that scared me terribly because I thought about how traumatised I was at 12, it was the first time anyone I knew had passed on and I remember from then on, really disliking the overwhelming smell of lilies. My mom had always said Joyce is so lucky, she met Tony when he had resources, poor Jo and it always stuck with me and now that fear was coming back and real. It made me feel conflicted. Joyce had given me two paintings which are in our guest bathroom downstairs and they were Auntie Jo’s, tropical paintings where the way the women were painted, they had one breast. I remembered the photos of holidays we went on when she had no hair, wearing a cap and I thought 20 years on, I am like that too. I had terror. Zhan told me to think about something else, think about Abu-Cha, this restaurant we went to in Niseko when we went skiing. I tried, but I kept repeating Abu-Cha, Abu-Cha, and I had a mental image but it was all swimming. I prayed and prayed, prayed and prayed. God, be with me, God be here, be here. I kept praying and praying and after what felt like 30-45 minutes, but might have been shorter, it passed. I was calmer. Then I was calm. I still couldn’t go back to sleep but it did pass. It passed. So I need to remember that and keep doing it, and hopefully, as I get better this won’t happen anymore.
I didn’t have much appetite today. Sometimes this is the case especially at breakfast or lunch, when I’m alone, although maybe I’m just not hungry.
I tried to do things to keep a schedule, like reading the Bible in the morning. I get disturbed when I read it at night, I guess there’s too much literal fear still. The Psalms talk a lot about suffering and death and I guess I process it better in the morning. I try to walk and swim to keep active and also to tire myself out. When I have the energy, then I try to catch on to doing some small thing, like look at a phone bill it seems very little compared to what I used to do but I tell myself just do what you can and if you’re tired, lie down and rest awhile. I’m trying to learn new things to keep myself going and to be a little more in control of the technology in the house or that Zhan uses, like Spotify or Sonos music. It does often feel like you are trying to fill, or counting the hours but keeping busy does help to keep you going.
Many women say that chemo is the worst part because just when you are feeling better, you get knocked down again and the momentum that you were getting better, doesn’t really build up. I hope that’s true that surgery and radiation is a lot faster to get over! I’m telling myself you have to keep going and after chemo is over, you know, you will have more energy, you will feel better and doing as much as you did before, doing real-life things, won’t seem such a stretch. And not every real-life thing will be cancer-related, as it is now, so it will be less of a constant.
I also tell myself, no one lives in a cancer world. Everyone lives in the looking-for whisky-in-airport-duty-free-world, or promotion world, or finance world, or industry world, property-market world, definitely I’m pregnant or have kids world, next-holiday-travel world, or lego-movie-latest internet meme world and I kind of only know one world right now but it’s the one I guess no one wants to talk about. This is what happens if you do nothing and are just at home, so I need to find things to talk about or read about. I could watch some news, yesterday I asked Zhan to show me a video on Apple watch. It struck me as ironic that over the time it took them to launch this watch, my world collapsed and here I am learning about how they have two editions, the sports edition and the $10,000 gold edition so that I would have something to talk to people about.
I was even thinking well, what could I do besides what I used to? What if we didn’t have kids, maybe I could work with kids, like in a playschool. There is one near our house. I looked up their qualifications and went to see that site, which was a jobs re-training page. You can take courses to be a childcare person, or a florist or a baker.
That kind of lands you smack in that uncomfortable position where you don’t know what else you are qualified to do and unlike a really young person who is still in school, now you kind of have this thought as to whether you would have enough time to get qualified. The course was for 20 months and I found myself thinking, is that too long because you don’t know what will happen.
You look through all these courses and I remembered some of the training places from when I was a teenager and that was kind of depressing because so many years of investment and work go into a job, or a career, or a speciality or a profession. Good if it’s a passion. If not, then where does that leave you? It’s like all my nightmares conflated into one. I’ve done the same thing for 10 years, of course changing is horrifying. Especially the thought of an involuntary change. I suppose it’s like people who get retired who weren’t prepared for it.
People seem excited about the idea of plans or any course, or direction, but I never know if people are agreeing because they are just kidding me because they pity you and it might not matter anyway? Sometimes I don’t know why people tell me what they tell me and what to make of it at all.
In the end, that didn’t really lead anywhere but I’m telling myself, well, I don’t know what I will do now and maybe I will go back to my job because there were some things I liked about it. Or maybe it won’t have meaning and given how arbitrary and early this diagnosis is, maybe it doesn’t make sense anymore. I read somewhere that when Sheryl Crow went through this, she did other things, she stayed away from writing songs over treatment because it was so tied up with the past and her sense of identity that it seemed to be setting herself up for self-criticism or failure, and that kind of resonated with me. I know I will probably be nervous when the time comes and maybe you do it for a while to find your feet, or maybe I will need more time to try different things and see if it feels happier or less stressful. Right now I don’t really know anything more than I want to be healthy and do what Zhan wants to do. So, for now, I can just have that and keep going and see how things turn out. Don’t beat myself up.
