Gee, think it’s been long enough since my last post? I sort of fell off the face of the earth for a while there. Unacceptable. I’ll try not to let that happen again. But I have a good excuse. Or I sort of do. You see, I’ve lost my mojo.
About a week ago I got a cold and at the same time my back started to cramp up. To give you a little background (so to speak), my dorso is a piece of crap, generally, and this is not the first time that it has acted up. In fact I think the trouble this time around started in October when we travelled to Gordes, France and I woke up with a crimp on one side after sleeping in the hotel bed. Maybe it hasn’t quite been the same since then and I’d managed to ignore it to the best of my abilities. Which is no longer possible.
So my back, in conjunction with a nagging, sinusy cold, has somewhat flattened me. It has been a humbling and frustrating experience. Because for the first time since I was on the juice this past spring I have felt limited. Add that to the common stresses of the holiday season (travel plans, Xmas shopping, yadda yadda) to which I feel I should be immune (now that I’ve had cancer and should have perspective on the important things in life and shit) and boil it up and it equals a big ball of spirit-crushing bah-humbugness.
Seriously, I feel like I sailed through chemo only to be levelled by a much lesser adversary, or rather adversaries. The common cold. A stiff back. Holiday woes. Pathetic. Absotively, posolutely, pathetic.
When I felt the funk coming on I tried my mantra (“come on, you pussy!”) but it fell on deaf ears. Now that I am not being treated I just don’t cut myself the same slack. And I feel like my body has once more become the enemy.
It is not lost on me that I am coming up on the one-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. Last Christmas, you may have read in early posts, was spent in the Boston area undergoing a battery of scans and biopsies which unveiled the unthinkable. Could this milestone be affecting me? I honestly do not know. Maybe.
Last Friday I had my six-month check-up with my oncologist here in London. I can tell you that at my three-month check-up with the breast surgeon I pretty much sashayed into his office and didn’t give the thing much thought. But this time I decided to try a different tack and go completely mental.
I scheduled my blood test two hours prior to the appointment to make sure that the results were back prior to seeing the oncologist. (They do things fast at this place and one hour is usually enough. I know; it’s odd. Try to get a landline or a bank account in the UK and it takes eight weeks but you can get your tumour marker test at lightning speed…) Despite my brilliant plan I was fifteen minutes late to the appointment for the blood test. It was raining. After I arrived I sat in the waiting room for ONE HOUR before they finally called me in. At this point I had worked myself into a real lather. I tried to read the third Stieg Larsson Girl With… book on my iPhone while I secretly stressed about the blood tests and whether they would be done in time for the oncologist and God forbid before everything shut down for the weekend. This, even though I know perfectly well that such blood tests are not that reliable, and certainly not determinative of whether one’s cancer has come back (at least breast cancer — I don’t know about other kinds).
A tumour marker test can turn out negative yet you might have cancer and conversely it can be positive and lead to unpleasant investigations which then reveal that you are in fact cancer free. So I really think that I got myself worked up just because. It was symbolic. It was something to stress about.
When the nurse finally called me and did my bloods (they call it bloods here this is not a typo) and flushed my port for what I hope is the last or at least penultimate time before I have it removed next year, I allowed myself to calm down. Then I went to lunch and ate a shrimp and mango salad at Le Pain Quotidien on Marylebone High Street while I watched a woman with an infant and a toddler try to order lunch while her toddler lay on the floor and had a classic tantrum, beating his fists, shrieking and generally being a real pill. This didn’t bother me in the least because it was not my child and I was therefore impervious to his bull shit. I almost found it charming, since my children are now older.
Then I went back to the doctor’s office to wait, again, in the lobby. I met my husband there. While we waited I observed a woman get her “goody bag” of medication from the pharmacist who explained each drug, what it was for and what to expect in terms of side effects. The patient had a very short haircut and it looked like her hair had started to go from chemo or else she had hacked it off in anticipation. I felt very sorry for her. It almost made me want to cry, watching her. And as I observed her sitting there as I had done only months prior, I thought how terribly odd it is that I feel so very far away from where she is right now. Out the other side. Back ache, cold, holiday stress and all. Maybe that’s why I have been so pissed about being off my game. I am used to feeling GOOD now. And I have no patience for this crap.
Everything turned out just fine, of course. My check-up was dandy and that was that and we went on our merry way, parting company with those at different stages of this unpalatable and bizarre journey.
So I think I’ll give myself a little pass and try not to beat myself up too much. It’s been a hard year. I’ve been through the ringer and as much as I’d like to pretend that I am “normal” now I ain’t quite there yet. I might get sick more often. And I might take longer to recover from it when I am. My nails are still a terrible mess, many of them partially detached from the nail beds (yesterday a grain of rice got wedged right up under my right middle fingernail and I managed to get it out with tweezers — that was fun). And I’m starting to look weird with this bushy ashy hairdo that has begun to look a little less cute and chic and a little more “mom with bad haircut who desperately needs a dye job.”
I am human. I am fallible. But at the end of the day I am still the honey badger, damn it and I will get through times like this and come out smiling. I am Andy DuFresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. (If you haven’t seen Shawshank then please go watch it, for crying out loud).
To help me along on this path I plan to get my hair done and do physio for my back until it stops this nonsense. I also might have to visit Prada when we travel to Italy later this month. I know, that last bit was totally random. But I have to keep you on your toes.