Survival Weekend in Here Be Dust

I was not aware until recently that the first Sunday in June has been designated National Cancer Survivors Day. While I appreciate the sentiment and am grateful for each day that I’m on this side of the grass, I can’t help but feel that this kind of attention adds up to, “Congratulations for being lucky.” So far.

As Nancy Stordahl writes, this kind of celebration “leaves out those who have not survived. What about them? Where’s their day?” In addition, she adds, those living with metastatic cancer are “sort of in this survivors’ circle, yet at the same time, sort of on the outside looking in.”

She writes, “We must never give the impression that we have beaten cancer because we have not.” (Not to mention that NCSD is also, to a great extent, about merchandising.)

Last month at WhatNext, BoiseB invited us “to post a memorial of anyone who perished fighting cancer” as part of a Memorial Day remembrance. Of the 11 people I memorialized, five had been people whom I had gotten to know online. Two of those had been within the WhatNext community, which I had joined just a little more than a year ago. All had touched me deeply over the course of just a few months. While writing this post I learned of a third person I knew through WhatNext who has died, along with a member of my breast cancer support group. I still have trouble thinking of them as gone. Less than 24 hours after I learned of that latest death, I read Susanne’s tribute to Sarah Merchant, dead on June 12, 2015, at age 34 from metastatic breast cancer. Less than 24 hours after that I read 38-year-old Rosie Choueka’s “My final post.”

All that being said, I have identified as a “survivor” from the day of my diagnosis, in line with the American Cancer Society’s definition of the term. My picture joins those of many others in What Next’s Facebook photo album of survivors, posted last Sunday.

The “day of diagnosis” definition is a matter of convenience, but is not what I would call accurate as far as cancer goes. As I have written, a good look at my old mammogram images places what was eventually recognized as my tumor at least as far back as 2004.

More precisely, I have identified as a cancer survivor since the day of my diagnosis. I have identified as a survivor for far longer, which is where last weekend comes in.

This year the first Sunday in June, earmarked for National Cancer Survivors Day, fell on June 7. But Saturday, June 6, marked the 49th anniversary of my having been hit by a car. Both my legs had been broken; the left had sustained a compound fracture. My intestines had been ripped open. My spleen had almost ruptured. At age seven I had spent two weeks in critical condition, ten weeks in the hospital, and then four months on crutches.

That makes two summers spent fighting for my life: the first in a hospital, the second on chemo. In many ways that first summer had helped prepare me for the second.

I had been lucky then, too. Across from me in the children’s ward, a six-year-old girl had died of kidney failure before I was discharged. As with my cancer survivorship, I feel the need for balance. That I am alive is personally significant to me, but my memory of her is also significant. Her only visitor had been her grandmother, and the girl had cried every night after visiting hours were over and her grandmother had to leave.

Part of my gift of still being alive is my ability to remember her. Just as part of my gift of still being alive is the privilege of remembering and memorializing those dead of cancer who can no longer be called active survivors but who have nonetheless touched lives, including mine.

On Monday, June 8, I had my first post-treatment mammogram. This (re)sets the baseline for all future mammograms.

Large

I felt no “scanxiety” going in, but I was intensely curious. Given the new and hard lumps in my left breast, would the mammogram feel different? (It hurt a bit for the first image; the other two felt like a standard mammogram.) I also wanted to see what my cut, poisoned, and fried breast now looked like on the inside. In addition to changes from treatment, the “before” and “after” images were taken at different facilities due to my hospital’s acquisition.

The tech gave me the good news: “You look fabulous!” Monday’s images were labeled as benign. (As I waited for my results, I decided that the carpet in the area outside the imaging room really belonged in a neurosurgeon’s office. It looked like a bunch of sulci and gyri, the furrows and ridges that make up a brain.)

The new facility does not convert older mammogram films to digital, but neither does it keep films. After review by the radiologist (including that of my newer, digital images from 2013 and 2014), my films were returned to me to keep.

As survivorship goes, a DVD from Oregon State University’s Better Bones and Balance program is en route to me, along with a weighted vest. I have also been attending a Healthy Living class being given at my radiation center.

My standing desk set-up shown here has been in use for at least two hours daily, and I’ve been using my manual treadmill (in addition to my hour-long workouts on a stationary bike) for 30 minutes at least twice a week as a form of weight-bearing aerobic exercise. I have added free weights to my workout as well, but my carpal tunnel exacerbation from anastrazole can make that dicey, which is why I look forward to strapping on a weighted vest instead.

As I wrote in my latest update at MyFitnessPal, “Needless to say, the side effects piss me off, but not as much as cancer does.”

On Friday I did a hands-on art demo at my breast cancer support group. Before we broke out the markers and crayons, I showed a sped-up screen capture of the way I doodle.

I provided live narration, so there’s no sound during the roughly 11-minute video. Actual elapsed drawing time was 48 minutes. I also wanted to show some of ArtRage’s capabilities. They have a powerful, free (no expiration date) demo, which I used to do almost all of my meditation doodles during active treatment. The video starts with a screen cap of their demo page and gives the URL.