What's with the name?

One day you're fine dot dot dot was the name I gave to a health-anxiety I'd held for as long as I could remember. It went like this:

One day you're fine, you wake up and shower and go about your business and you feel fine physically, you go to work, maybe you leave early because you have a doctor's appointment for some vague persistent ache or something. And when you get to the doctor, you describe said vague pain and the doctor takes a look, and that's when BAM-- you find out you have a terminal illness, an incurable disease, an inoperable tumor, mere months or even weeks to live.

I knew this kind of thing happened to people all the time -- well maybe not all the time, but often enough that I'd read about it, heard about, believed it could happen to anyone. I knew there was nothing one could actually do about the fact that this could happen-- cancer and other life-threatening diseases happen, sometimes to people who just 24 hours prior did not know, could not fathom, did not feel especially unwell. 

I knew this intellectually, accepted it that it existed, but emotionally, I could not be ok with the fact of it. I was off-and-on obsessed with it, reading cancer blogs until the wee morning hours. One day you're fine—the next, you're staring down your own death decades before you thought you'd ever have to. One day you're fine and the next, you are most seriously not.

I never pushed the thinking any farther than that – as in, once you know this, how does it then affect your life?  I just saw it as a fact that I knew was true but that I could not reconcile internally, and I couldn't imagine anyone being able to. How do people go through every day knowing that life at any moment could pull the proverbial rug out from under your feet-- how do they know this and not end up crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth?

And then, as the story so famously goes, it happened to me.

One day I was fine, I was at the doctor's getting my annual pap smear, mentioning some vague abdominal cramping,… and the next, I was staring down my own death decades before I thought I would ever even have to think about it. In the space of 24 hours, I was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer.

For the record, I'd had no previous serious medical issues, no broken bones, tonsilitis. There was no history of cancer in my family. And, despite the 20-centimeter tumor now lying across my abdomen, I had no excruciating pain.

When my OB-GYN doctor told me what she suspected it was, I remember the visceral feeling of separating from the rest of the world, from the non-cancer people, the people who could continue with their lives not knowing. I could feel the isolation already beginning, the leaving of one country and the entrance into another from which I could not return, even if the disease didn't kill me.

So that's why the name. And that's why this blog or record or journal or memoir or whatever it is. I tried not writing about it for the longest time, swore to myself that cancer may now have invaded every pore of my body and my life and there is nothing I can do about it, but I will NOT let it enter my writing space or what was left of it, the former safe space/sanctuary. I can control that at least.

But I write to make sense of things. And this is something that now, even 5 months, 5 chemo treatments and one ginormous surgery later I cannot fathom. So here I am. Here we are.