My friends who know where I got the title... well, it's not perfectly fitting, the whole feeling of that song, but it was inevitable I'd reference it. The diagnosis and all that followed was completely unexpected, kind of unbelievable (still), devastating, and yet it could have been so much worse. In fact only recently have I understood just how dire the situation actually was. I don't really remember the 2-3 days leading up to the 2nd surgery; I read my posts from that time and try to recall, but it's all quite hazy. I remember being told to expect waking up in the ICU and that's about it. Ryan recently told me my surgeon said to him, as they were about to move me to the OR, "We don't want to do this." But there really wasn't any other option. I was sick, poisoned from the inside, only getting worse and the fight was draining me. He was told to prepare to be a single parent for a while, maybe for months, maybe forever. I don't remember this at all - I can only imagine I wasn't lucid, or maybe I just blocked it out. To hear him tell it, I was as good as dead. Maybe that's what it looked like, to him.
In any case we know how that worked out. I woke up, not in the ICU, and went home 4 days later, a few organs lighter and essentially cancer-free. The five months of treatment that followed was other than delightful, to say the least, but it did not destroy me. It tried really, really hard - especially right there at the end - but did not succeed.
Some days I do feel like I'm back from the dead. Raising my arms above my head still feels like a miracle. I celebrate staircases now, the steeper the better. I get to do all the things that felt burdensome before, as eagerly as I do all the things that aren't. I have never appreciated an uninterrupted night's sleep more than I do now, after 1am vitals and blood draws in the hospital, steroid-induced night sweats during chemo, insomnia after being woken up by thousands of hot flashes, cramps from radiation, and alarms set for midnight, 3am, 6am painkillers so I wouldn't wake up a basket case.
Some days it's like it never happened. That blissful state only ever lasts a few seconds before it's replaced by another, equally blissful state of triumph and amazement: it did happen and I survived. And I recognize I feel normal because of how hard many people worked to get me back to that place, and how hard they continue to work to keep me there.
It's an odd thing, this consciousness, in this life. I never felt my days were numbered. I feel this fact keenly now, sitting with my kids, embracing my husband, moving with time as it passes. I don't know the number of days, but I sense now that this is what will end me, this cancer or something related to it, and I expect to see it coming and have the morbid opportunity to prepare.
Not yet, though. I'm up for a few more pretty good years.
Some days I do feel like I'm back from the dead. Raising my arms above my head still feels like a miracle. I celebrate staircases now, the steeper the better. I get to do all the things that felt burdensome before, as eagerly as I do all the things that aren't. I have never appreciated an uninterrupted night's sleep more than I do now, after 1am vitals and blood draws in the hospital, steroid-induced night sweats during chemo, insomnia after being woken up by thousands of hot flashes, cramps from radiation, and alarms set for midnight, 3am, 6am painkillers so I wouldn't wake up a basket case.
Some days it's like it never happened. That blissful state only ever lasts a few seconds before it's replaced by another, equally blissful state of triumph and amazement: it did happen and I survived. And I recognize I feel normal because of how hard many people worked to get me back to that place, and how hard they continue to work to keep me there.
It's an odd thing, this consciousness, in this life. I never felt my days were numbered. I feel this fact keenly now, sitting with my kids, embracing my husband, moving with time as it passes. I don't know the number of days, but I sense now that this is what will end me, this cancer or something related to it, and I expect to see it coming and have the morbid opportunity to prepare.
Not yet, though. I'm up for a few more pretty good years.
