So on the 28th they are going to put me back into a tube. Scan my chest. Create another picture like the one that started all this. And the doctors will marvel at the 3 dimensional detail of it all. They like to go slice by millimeter slice. (I really don’t know how big my tumor is because I don’t understand the metric system.) And say again things like, “None of this should be here.” In these scenarios the phrase “very large tumor” seems to get used a lot. When this started, every time I went in for a scan the news got worse. A mass turned into a tumor turned into lung cancer turned into stage 4 lung cancer. I haven’t had a scan since starting chemo.
It is like they are telling me that I am deluded. What I thought was happening with my body was so completely wrong they seem almost embarrassed to have to point out my ignorance. I had a cough. My incurious primary care person was intent on reassuring me with pharmaceuticals. A touch of the cough-variant asthma can very well produce blood in the hanky. I am afraid they will have to cure me of my self-delusion again, on the 28th.
Because I feel good. My body tells me that I am getting better. That, barring an incident with a bad tomato, we are farther from death. There is so much more life coming in. I am breathing in the joy of the running dog, exhaling microscopic bits of tumor. I am inhaling the touch of friends and exhaling disease. Music in, death out. Kindness in, death out. Wonder and curiosity in, stuck places out. Too much love in one body for there to be room for cancer. I am so much more than my pathology.
But I fear self-delusion.
Also, there is rational reason to hope. Because A) I coughed up some bits of the beasty and B) My cough has gone away. And while I don’t know What That Means exactly, I know the chemo is working because my hair fell out and my white blood count is low. Even the most skeptical would have to agree that something fairly significant is happening.
Meanwhile I am working very hard at accepting that I don’t get to know the outcome of this. I get to be as alive and curious and joyful as possible. I get to have really excellent moments and some truly fabulous days. I get myself emotionally situated, find a place like “not knowing” and camp out. Set up my hammock and get a glass of water. Get a couple of books and a box of raisins and watch the light change. Contemplate the wonder of all this and the miracle of space between objects. Right now is okay. Better than okay for the most part. Not that different from peace actually.
But hope is hard. It is motion. It is riding the rails. Every little thing wakes me up. Every bump and turn makes me wonder where I am. If i am doing the right thing. Where cure is the only acceptable destination. It is sleepless hyper-vigilance. Hope is very much like fear. Too much sometimes for me to tell the difference.
I realize it is unamerican to eschew hope. Please know- my desire is very much to live. I am very deeply in love with this life in fact. Never more than now. I think I take exception with the impulse to have single-minded hope. Tight fisted hope without nuance. Hope that isn’t interested in the process- only the destination. Because in tangible terms, the process is all I have. All any of us have really.
Which is all just a tedious way of saying that I am worried about a CAT scan. That they will terrify me again with their What You Don’t Know. Terrorism. The power of naming. The power to pull you off your hammock onto the floor.
Have faith.
Me too.
Me too about hope and its flip side, fear.
Me too about trying to learn to live in the now, in the purely distilled unyielding unknowing.
Me too, ignorant and worried and hoping and scared to hope and scared.
Me too, trying to bask in the moments of beauty, clutching the edges of the hammock, eyeing the ground beneath.
Thinking about the conservation of matter.
From 2:30AM to 5:30AM on July 13 my partner and I walked the oval track for the American Cancer Society’s “Relay for Life.” The track was quiet and mostly dark, save for a glowing row of luminarias that lined the inside lane, each candle illuminating the name of someone battling cancer. “Deborah’s Val” was printed in lavish script on one of them, and I thought of you each time I rounded that turn.
My partner Mary would totally sympathize with your situation of not feeling as sick as the tests say. She was a competitive athlete at the time, and suddenly was faced with scheduling surgery to remove body parts that from all outward appearances seemed perfectly healthy.
Hopefully your test results will take an upward turn and new scans will show good things happening in your body.
perhaps you can have others hold hope for you? I’d be happy to be a hope-holder if it’s too loaded for you to carry.