So far I have only had the kind of cancer in which it’s the treatment that makes you feel so sick and unhealthy, not the cancer.  I guess this makes me lucky.

However, it is kind of a weird situation to grapple with mentally.  You are walking around harboring a deadly disease and you feel fine, you look fine, and you are not fine*.  Then chemo makes you tired, sick or sickish, prone to catching whatever’s going around, and possibly bald.  Plus a varied bouquet of other side effects depending on the chemo.  And so you feel sick for sure.  But it’s the medicine that’s doing it to you. Bizarre.

Thus it is almost comforting in a weird way to undergo something straightforward like “a little surgery” because, for that, you start out feeling fine, you get operated upon, you naturally feel wounded afterward, it is easy to understand why, you have to rest, you gradually feel better, and then you are all better and back to normal.

Right now I think I am gearing up for undergoing something much less straightforward, without a simple start, middle, and end.  I don’t really like that.

*Navigating this paradox is the source of this blog’s title.