Where have I been?
Sorry, dear readers, I let the blog slip away as part of my determination to shed my persona as a cancer patient.
But like it or not, I still am and always will be a cancer patient, albeit not now (and hopefully never again) one in active treatment. I still go to the cancer center at least once a month for shots, blood tests and/or checkups. But it's like returning to your elementary school; it all seems so long ago and far away that I was a regular part of that world. I see the bald people in the waiting room and my chin thrusts up as I differentiate myself -- I have hair, therefore I am "cured."
Everyone wants so much for me to say that I am cured, in remission, totally done with cancer. No one wants that to be true more than I do. But I'm superstitious. And technically there's no clear way to say that I'm cured, although once five years pass cancer-free, I'd be willing to say that this episode may be done.
I feel like someone living in a witness protection program. I've re-established the routines of my life and returned to work full time. But part of me is always waiting for the knock on the door that could catapult me back into the cancerverse.
As I understand it, the detectable cancer was cut out of my body in two surgeries; one for the breast, one for the lymph nodes. All those many months of treatment were to zap any undetectable cancer -- microscopic cells that one day might colonize in my bones, brain, lungs or liver. But since the treatment targeted something undetectable, it's not possible to measure its effectiveness. As a cancer friend says, "There's no way to know for sure that the treatment worked until you die of something else."
Really I'm not that grim about it. I've resolutely turned my back on the big/not so big C. I feel pretty good except for creeping exhaustion.
My hair is springing back with the kind of cute little curls I'd always wished for. About two-thirds of patients get "chemo curl." Eventually it will grow out, but for now I'm enjoying it.
Dolly has emerged from all these months of treatment looking, dare I say, fabulous. The radiation burn turned into a killer tan, as if I'd spent the last year lounging topless (or rather half topless) on the sands of Saint Tropez instead of being sequentially carved, poisoned and burned. Poor Plain Jane on the other side has clearly spent her whole life where the sun don't shine. Radiation also caused some edema; the result is a startlingly youthful, fuller-figured Dolly with just that one cute dimple where the surgeon wielded her scalpel. It's as if I'd had Brigitte Bardot's boob transplanted onto my chest.
