Awhile back I wrote a post about the kiss and slap cycle, the proclivity for bad news to immediately follow good news here in my cancer world. A scan would show me cancer free and my pits would erupt with lumps; no cancer found in my lungs, and the old krakatoa tumor on my chest (Rest in Hell), would erupt with bloody fury. It got so that I'd hear the doctor say something positive thing and I'd just nod and say wait...
Lately though we might have broken the old cycle--or not, it's not definite yet. Post surgery, full on recovery misery, I found a goddamn lump under my right arm. But it wasn't typical, it hurt when you pressed it, and the first one I found disappeared. Angry lymph node. I tucked that away and kept it to myself. A few days later it was back but in a new place. Still hurt, I stayed silent. I watched and waited. This wasn't kiss and slap though--I felt like shit anyway. The surgery had gone well, but the slap was the fact that I felt like I was on a deathbed anyway. I didn't have to find another.
The second one went away. Fluid back up in the system, perhaps. A few clear days follow and then BAM, third time's the charm, a full on lump, but still hurt. That hurt is a good sign that it's an infection, it's an inflamed node, it's an inconvenience, not a killer. This time I spoke to the doctors, they said, it sounds infected. Let's watch. And so we do, we watch. We wait, we poke it to see if it hurts and cheer when it does.
Cancer will always be with me, and the lump will come that doesn't hurt, that is silent and confident. It may signal a need a change of chemo; it might be the last lump. I don't know. I don't wait around for it, but I'm vigilant. I want to know. I don't want to be the cancer equivalent of the woman who has a toilet baby.
But this may be the end of the kiss/slap cycle, and I welcome that. I'm growing up, I'm batting harder and pitching to hurt back. I thank cancer for what I've learned from the experience at the same moment I'm bitch slapping it down to manageable size. Balance is coming more easily, regret is slipping away from me. I think fondly of hamburger but it no longer moves me. I wish I could sing, but I never could sing for shit, so we're all better off. The people in my life who enjoyed me before cancer enjoy me now, in a different way, and I mean something different to them. I who didn't look or particularly act vulnerable now very much look it, and even allow people to know how vulnerable I actually am. I acknowledge fear, but I don't fear it.
The other night my dream was dominated by the landscape I was in, one like that Robin Williams movie, What Dreams May or something like that. I was in my after life, mine. I had a nice cottage in the mountains and a few miles away from the house, a ring of fast food joints representing about every kind of food done in a few minutes or less and I was in hog heaven. I personally love fast food because it's there, ready, and I can start scarfing in moments.
There are obviously different realities we all inhabit. I don't revolve in the world of my nieces and nephews with their own kids and concerns and extended families and arguments and what not--I'm just a subset that interacts occasionally, on our shared basis, our Priceness. Otherwise, they see the world and experience it completely differently than I do, as do my neighbors, and my friends, and everyone.
We do not move to the same groove and think alike, go the same places at the same time or have the same desires. Ergo, our worlds are very different, our experiences of them different, we are different. If we come together, we operate as subsets in each others bag of daily experiences, good, bad, indifferent.
Yet we all understand each other's triumphs and tragedies through the lens of our own experience and think of them as shared or discrete. I've been blessed with many people who understand cancer and why it sucks, and can understand the painful side of it, the part that occasionally needs someone else's kiss, whether physical or verbal. That's not something I'm conditioned to ask for, or to tell people that I need, so all along when it's happened (and thank you all, it's happened a lot), I feel the gratitude of knowing that I know great people.
The last two years have been a grind. A terrible one. I've been hooked like an ox to a water wheel and I walk in continual circles, some creep always behind me whipping my ass forward. At first I pulled hard and walked fast and was simply defiant, but I couldn't keep that up and it made no sense. I started to amble a bit. Let my head hang occasionally, and looked at the view I could make out. The chemo washed over me and I felt no change, but change was happening. I started to forget some small facts, names started to fly away. I struggled to remember things that happened to me as a kid, things that I'd never forgotten before.
Life is passing by me faster and faster, and this is ok. I'm readjusting to my post surgery life by sitting on the back deck in my rocker every day for a few minutes, watching my shade garden go native because I can't pull all the weeds. I start Physical Therapy this week because my left shoulder got effed up a bit in the surgical pull. I do not look forward to it. P/T people are like a cross between Scientologists and Bolsheviks, pulling all the fanatacism and none of the humor that each potentially represent. YOU WILL MOVE THAT ARM LIKE THIS LIKE THIS LIKE THIS!
Every once in awhile, I think I'll close my eyes and nap and try to get back to that afterlife dream, that Popeye's chicken joint, the Inn-n-Out and Whataburger down the road. I never waddle home afterwards, you don't gain weight there! You just think a better life and there it is, kind of like here.
