2014 in Review: Courage in Here Be Dust

(My friend K gifted me with this mug before my lumpectomy.)

“Courage” is a term that gets bandied about a lot in connection with cancer, so here’s my take on it. I keep a handwritten journal in addition to blogging. The journal contains what I call my “raw data” – myriad snippets ranging from dreams to To Do lists to rants. What follows are excerpts from last year on and around the topic.

March 21: (17 days after diagnosis, 4 days before lumpectomy) P says something to the effect that I’m the bravest woman she knows. I wrote back that it takes one to know one.

I don’t feel brave. I feel somewhat fatalistic – que sera sera. I feel vulnerable, but resigned to my vulnerability. I feel a version of what I had felt when my father drove recklessly and I resigned myself to the possibility that I might die. I resigned myself to my own powerlessness.

I had grown up not feeling safe. I suppose I learned to move on through my fear, and to jump at whatever opportunity for some control presented itself. Prepare as best I can.

Not bravery so much as transcendence. I have what I suppose serves as a spiritual escape hatch.

March 28: L was surprised I’m taking all of this as well as I can. I’m not sure there’s a way to explain or even if I want to try. I’m not sure I fully understand it all, myself. It just is.

It has to do with the dark places I’ve been in, the fears I’ve had to deal with, my own stripping down to a kernel of self. Given life with M and all the uncertainties and occasional states of panic there, cancer is just another thing to deal with.

When the doorbell rang [a delivery of flowers] and I asked who it was, I told the guy to wait and had to get M to move her contraption of heavy wood board, crutch, and blanket so that I could open the door. No way was I going to mess with that board [3 days after lumpectomy]. I got M to agree to leave her contraption off the door. [M insists on keeping all doors and windows covered and gets agitated when they’re not.]

April 13: My journey here has just begun. The surgery is only the beginning. It’s like the first major winter storm, leaving the rest of the winter and more storms to slog through.

I have no problem telling people that I’m a cancer patient and at the same time it doesn’t feel quite real.

I don’t feel frightened. I think I feel curious more than anything else.

I am now less than 19 months younger than my mother had been at the time of her death, and I understand just a little bit more of what she was going through – but only a little. Between everything that was hidden from me and my own need to escape the craziness of my household, much of her experience had been a black box. I could see her physical weakness and her exhaustion. I remember her telling me that she would lie awake in the middle of the night, crying as my father slept, afraid that she wouldn’t live until the morning.

She had a lot of guts that I feel I am only now beginning to appreciate. [My Reach to Recovery mentor] calls me brave for attending to my dental work at this time (she is overdue on hers). I’ve been called brave for how I’ve dealt with cancer.

I had a good role model.

One Facebook quote that sticks with me says something like, “Forget about thinking outside the box. There is no box.” I have been feeling that more and more. Intellectual knowledge is one thing; this is heart knowledge now.

April 22: Listening to Thomas Newman’s score from Skyfall. Am at the park after meeting with [my oncologist].

He is recommending chemo.

Blinking away tears because I am afraid for my health and well-being. I’ve just celebrated being able to put on and pull off T-shirts again. Left arm has reached full flexibility. Am enjoying these days of functionality while I can.

No one lives forever. I just need to try to live each day as best I can. And only I can decide that.

May 25: I guess one could say I’m in Transcendent Mode. The comments I’ve gotten call me brave and inspirational in the way that I’ve been meeting this all head-on. For me, that’s just like breathing, so on a deep level I really don’t get what all the fuss is about.

If I were still up north and working steady double and triple shifts, this would be much, much harder. Moving down here and cutting expenses practically ranks up there with sterilization in my Best Decisions category.

My car accident is another reason I’ve taken cancer in stride, at least so far. I know what it is like to be near death.

I’ve lived through a lot of stuff and have lived a sheltered life at one and the same time.

It is what it is.

Caregiving for M and weathering her chaos is what it is.

Cancer is what it is.

Chemo is what it is.

Mortality is what it is.

May 28: One thing this cancer does, with its mandate that I focus on my own health and well-being, is it has reinforced my spine. I see through more of people’s layers, and I pilot my own ship.

That includes interactions with M, who frets about household maintenance. Suddenly she’s got all these issues with the yard that she didn’t have before my diagnosis. Suddenly everything is all the more urgent, now that I am physically weaker.

Psychologically I grow stronger. I am focused as I have not been focused before.

Cancer – and, by extension, cancer treatment – is a challenge, and a dangerous mission. I fight for my body by damaging my body with chemo, and I fight the damage from chemo by making healthy choices to the best of my ability.

Knowing that at any time, this whole train could run off the rails. So I strive to get in a good ride.

June 29: During blood work 2 weeks ago, the chemo nurse commented on how brave all of us patients are, and added, “I wouldn’t have your kind of courage.”

I told her, “I think you have more courage than you think.”

She said, “Probably.”

Cancer had hit two of her sisters and killed one, plus her mother and two grandmothers. If I had grown up under those conditions, I would feel as though I were being stalked. Courage is a relative term.

July 11: [When I was growing up] I had REM-sleep dreams in which I’ve been [a childhood fantasy alter-ego with super powers], and I remember awakening disappointed because I had wanted to meet her instead. To sit down and talk with her. Being her in the dream had also felt as though I had been only playing a part.

It’s different in the chair.

It’s different because I call up the energies in my body to absorb the chemo drugs, and together we battle an intruder. I don’t think about [my alter-ego] battling the forces draining her energy, bringing all of her supernatural powers to bear on survival and on protecting others. I don’t reflect on the suffering and exhaustion – and dogged determination – that had marked my fantasies when I was a kid.

I don’t think about her, because I am her in those moments.

In the chair, I wield her power. Not the fantasy power of force fields and immortality and whatever else, but power nonetheless. Not with her knee-length brunette hair, but near-bald. Not her youthful look of 25, but my post-menopausal 55.

She had engaged in physical battles, requiring tremendous energy expenditures. She had to call up all of her supernatural bodily reserves. And I feel those energies course through me as I sit in the chair.

On one level, it is exhilarating. I use my body to fight cancer with the drugs, while also fighting to keep my health in spite of the severity of the drugs, and the damage they could cause. It is a firewalk.

The stuff that [my alter-ego] endured in my fantasies, I endure in real life. The same could be said for my dysmenorrhea, but this is different. I am calm and confident and cosmic.

It’s hard to describe, even while the chemo drugs are still in my system, which they will be for one more day. My body becomes a tool. Soon I will work out, pushing my body to keep my strength up. That is also part of this battle.

But I am finally, undeniably her, in a way I had never been her before. I no longer need to “meet” her. I am her, in a way that I can fully accept. It’s not a role. It is me.

August 3: L told me I have a “hardy personality.” I had to look it up afterwards. He’s right, much to my amusement. When he told me I was very strong, I laughed and said, “I’ve been finding that out.”

Of course what I’ve been dealing with is far less dire than what the two women to either side of me at chemo are dealing with.

August 25: L frets about my blood results – I told him this is typical for chemo. Just need to get the right risk/benefit balance. I approach this all with a sense of fascination. And with a feeling of affection toward my body, as in: We can get through this. Body, mind, and soul have teamed up with the medics to drive an invader out.

There’s a popular T-shirt that says, “Yes, they’re false. My real ones tried to kill me.” It bothers me on several levels, with the disclaimer that thus far I have needed only a lumpectomy.

My left breast has not tried to kill me. An invader in my left breast has. My breast was an occupied territory that is still under threat. If a mastectomy or any other cancer surgery is warranted, my body part is collateral damage from that invasion.

My body is where I live. We are a team, and cancer is a threat to the team, exacting a sacrifice.

What helps me through this whole process is that I have cleared my plate as much as possible. I don’t feel pressured to go places, do things, other than errands and other basic requirements. I am perfectly content to take it easy. That said, I’ve just done 2 jobs for [a client], including a challenging full-paper edit. Felt triumphant: Take that, chemo brain!

Back to the present day:

I have joined a plank challenge thread at MyFitnessPal.com. The goal is to log 180 minutes of planks for the month of January, in any combination.

Prior to treatment I had logged 7:30 worth of planks per session (4-minute basic plank + 1:45 for each side plank). I resumed my planks last month at 1:30 per session and am now up to 4:45.

Not sure if I’ll make it to 180 minutes, but I’ll do my best.

My strength training also progresses:

The high numbers are weight times total reps. The 99 represents my starting weight of 3.3 lbs (1.5 kg) lifted in 3 sets of 10 reps/set. The 237.6 is 6.6 lbs (3 kg) lifted in 3 sets of 12 reps/set. My switch from front raise to front/overhead raise means that I hold my weights at shoulder height for a couple of seconds before I extend them overhead, and I do the same on the way back down.

I was doing errands when I saw this cloudscape:

Much of the texture here had smoothed out in just a few minutes.

Two more pills and I will be through my first month of Arimidex. So far, so good. January is follow-up month for me, with my medical oncologist, radiation oncologist, and surgeon all on my dance card. I have no “scanxiety” at this point, though I do have various questions for each of them.

May 2015 be kinder to us all.