The cagey in-between place

Now that chemo treatments are over and maintenance treatments (aka clinical trial) have yet to begin, I spend a lot of the time trying to distract myself from the hardcore reality of my situation: tv, podcasts, crosswords, inane crafty things (felting? yup. tried it), cat videos, pictures of cakes. I haven't been officially deemed in remission (I have to wait for the CT scan for that to happen), though all my numbers, bloodwork, etc. look good and point in that direction. Woohoo!, right?

Yes and no. Please don't think for a minute I'm not grateful to be here, to have had my tumour obliterated by modern medicine and to have my body soldier through the poisons and the ginormous surgery without serious complications. Oh, people. I swim in an ocean of gratitude. Every. Single. Day. So yes, I am happy about nearing remission. And yet cognizant of the chilling question marks ahead. I'd venture to say that anyone with cancer or serious illness might have felt the same at some point.

Ovarian cancer, as you may have read on the deep, dark Interwebs at 3 in the morning to hahaha help you sleep hahaha, is a shifty, sneaky bastard. For women diagnosed at an advanced stage (which, due to a lack of available tests and vagueness of symptoms, is most of us), the chance of recurrence is high, or not insignificant, or... 

Well, listen, I try to stay away from deep, dark Interweb numbers and statistics because a lot of them are based on old data, and because I have a brain that will obsess over them until I am rocking in my bedroom corner, chewing on a sock. So I don't seek out or quote actual numbers. But they're high, these invisible-to-me numbers. I know this much. 

A small-yet-sizeable percentage of women do not recur at all, are considered Cured. So clearly I'm trying to put my energy in that direction. I can hope for that, I can blast the disease with all the modern and alternative medicines that exist, I can hazard guesses and make predictions but ultimately, I can't really know if I'll end up there. Cured. Sneaky means sneaky. Much of what will happen is determined by the disease itself. 

So while I'm happy to be done with chemo, excited at the prospect of my hair making a curly comeback, thankful not to have had any surgery complications, I am only cautiously so. I am that old woman standing knee-deep in the ocean, gingerly splashing water on her arms, afraid to dive right in. `

And trying still, after all these months, to make some sense of any of it. I suspect there's not a lot of sense to be made.