Last September and October, I found myself crying and crying over stories of Hurricane Katrina–the awful ones, the wistful ones, the happy-ending ones. Of course this was only in the car because One, we only listen to the radio in the car and Two, the car makes a nice private place to cry. This continued from the beginning of September to the middle of October, at which point my mom reminded me that it was almost exactly 10 years earlier that I had had the lumpectomy. Wow. Then I had a real cry, not in the car, and realized that I had found that lump the first few days of September, had it taken out, been diagnosed by surprise the end of September, etc.–in other words, had spent the same time period 10 years earlier getting closer to, discovering, and dealing with having cancer. After surgery it was much easier–the nodes were clean, the course was set, everybody knew–and after that in 1995 I was no longer so close to crying at stories of natural disaster.
My back, shoulders, and neck were really, really sore in January and February and March this year. No one knew why–exercise didn’t help, eliminating sugar or aspartame didn’t help (or only helped a little). Now my massage therapist thinks maybe that was my body reacting to the growth of the cancer. “Even if you didn’t know something stressful was going on, maybe your body did, and was showing that stress in your back.” That’s where my stress usually shows up anyway.
When our friend Vicki was dying of breast cancer early this year, and the partner of someone in our Quaker meeting was slowly dying of another cancer, and it was near the one-year anniversary of one of our intentional community members’ death of breast cancer, my attitude was really clear to me: I felt that this illness was all around me, all around my family, my friends, and it was totally random would get it next. As if we were all a herd of deer living our lives, grazing, sleeping, moving from field to woods, crossing roads, and who would be picked off next–by a hunter, a car, a disease–was completely unknowable, at the same time that the fact that there would be a next was completely obvious, just there.
In late March I heard a piece on NPR called “A Year to Live, A Year to Die”–the story of a man dying from brain cancer, told partly via his audio diary and partly through later comments by his wife and then widow. I listened to it in the car alone and cried and cried and wasn’t sure why it was getting to me so much except that it was apparently so horrible for both of them, on way more levels than the physical. I was a little disturbed to be so affected by it and asked my mom and Eric to listen to it, too.
When I found the lump in very late May I had a bad feeling. The weekend after I saw my midwife I was feeling lots of dread in a totally rejoiceful setting (my niece’s graduation from boarding school). Later it wore off, a bit, waiting for my surgical consult appointment, but once I picked up the ultrasound film and report in late June I felt like I was headed for right here, unless I was really, really lucky somehow.