Louder than the loud ocean

(This is a long one. You should probably get some tea and a seat)

It's been a while, I know. Truthfully, I am struggling with this new identity as someone with recurrent cancer. My CA125 jumped up again at the end of May (from 46 to 102), and that "pretty much" confirms that the cancer is back ("pretty much" is in quotation marks because according to my therapist, anything is possible, and i want always to leave room for the anything). now it's just a matter of time before either something shows up on a scan, or I become symptomatic.

Today I went for another CT scan (minus the gross drink you usually have to drink beforehand because COVID), and in 2 days I'll meet with my oncologist and we'll see what if anything has shown up. It's hard to know what to wish for -- of course I want the scan to show absolute clarity and no cancer at all ever, and on the other hand, well. well, if the cancer is indeed back in town, as my team of doctors believe, I would like to get started on eradicating as soon as humanly possible. So if it must show up, I wish for "it" to be as teenytinysmall as possible (a CT scan doesn't show anything smaller than 1mm, so I'm hoping that in the 6 weeks since my last clean scan, it hasn't been able to do much), and in a very treatable place (like "on" something, instead of "in" something).

Not that I am rushing to spend another summer dealing with chemo and its assorted side effects, I really really don't. But waiting, as you all know, is the hardest part. I would expand that phrasing, with no apologies to Tom Petty, to say that when you are dealing with cancer or any other life-threatening illness, waiting is one of the goddamn fucking hardest parts. that doesn't read as well as I thought it would but I'm sure you get the point.

Have we been through the possibilities of where Disease Part 2 might show up? That is not a joyous discussion, to be sure, but these are listed as the most common locations of ovarian cancer recurrences: liver, fluid around the lungs, spleen, intestines, brain, skin or lymph nodes outside the abdomen. This is why it is important not to look these things up. My oncologist says it very rarely goes to the brain, so there's that! OK ...

There is fear and stress and sadness and worry, of course. but the one emotion that presides over all others for me right now is ANGER. I can barely express the intensity and level of it. The things I'm angry about feel seemingly endless right now. When I first saw the CA125 number had gone up that much, I told my husband I needed to be alone. Then I went upstairs to our bedroom and screamed like a banshee (what is a banshee?, I am wondering now, since I seriously have been screaming like one for a solid week).*

I was obviously trying to release all the frustration and helplessness of this disease, which makes its own decisions. And while I have tried so very hard not to be a "why me?" person (I'm still technically not a "why me?" person, but I did have a few moments), I was really feeling it then, down at the very bottom of my humanness, asking, seeking, begging to understand. Have you been in this place before? If so, you know there is no desperation like it. It is amorphous, humungous, gaping. And the whole time you are beseeching, you know in your heart that there simply is no answer.

Obviously I haven't been able to write about it that much. But today I am sitting at the end of a crazy, historic week in our country, so much change and unrest and sorrow and terror, injustice and beauty, and what looks like it might be the timid beginning of a curve of hope --- and what I have to think about is cancer.  Like, I just want to be a "normal" person experiencing this unprecedented time in our lives, I want that to be the big thing. The primary thing. I am so fucking exhausted with the cancer filter.

So I'm trying this thing where I designate 2 times a day a period of 1/2 hour in which I may wallow, be angry, scared, scream, obsess, and freak out about cancer. The rest of the day I am trying to distract myself or better, focus on something else, anything else really, but the goal is to train my brain to think of good things, happy things, productive things. I guess right now is one of the 1/2 hours. Anyway, I've not been super-successful yet. But I would like to be turning my mind to other things most of the time if I can. I am not entirely clear what those other things will be. Please don't be thinking, oh! yoga, because I have tried to join that cult many times and no.

*so it turns out a banshee is Gaelic, and mostly identifies with "a female messenger or spirit alerting us of death." right. so from now on, I refuse to scream like a banshee. Instead, I will scream like:

• a peacock in heat (Tennessee Williams)
• some shrill, wet hurricane (Anita Desai), OR
• a loud ocean (Lord Byron)