is the waiting really the hardest part?

 did Tom Petty know someone with cancer? 

well here we are. tomorrow i have a scan that will show if the medication i'm on is working (holding cancer stable) or not (cancer is running rampant throughout my entire body, cancer has spread to virtually all my vital organs, cancer has one new growth and it's tiny, etc.). i honestly can't tell which way i think it will go, because even though the oncologist tells me to "go by how you feel" and i actually feel physically ok, i did not feel super-sick even when initially diagnosed. that doesn't help. 

the biggest struggle today (and many days) is with my thoughts. last year, the chemo i was on worked for about 2 infusions, did nothing on the 3rd, then stopped working for numbers 4, 5, and 6. super-disappointing. 

so now my brain is mostly convinced the same is happening here: the first two infusions of this drug, my tumor marker number was going down. on the 3rd, i think it went up (as implied by oncologist), and i have no idea what happened on the 4th infusion because i refuse to look up the number on my patient record. (i think i've mentioned, focusing on that one number drives me to insane levels of obsession, and the doctor isn't concerned unless there is an upward trend AND something shows on a scan. 

BUT. i can't help it -- my brain wants to find patterns and it thinks it has one here: something works for a few weeks or whatever, then it doesn't. these are totally different drugs, by the way. scary avastin is not technically chemo and it works differently in the body. so it's not equivalent to chemo and i therefore can't really make assumptions. but when has that stopped any cancer patient ever? 

BUT. it's also MARCH. MARCH has historically (as in, the last 2 years, ha) not been a great month for me. in March of 2019, i was initially diagnosed. in March of 2020, recurrence. so i would like this March of 2021 to you know, break the mold or whatever. 

i started the month by getting the first of my COVID vaccine shots, so there's that. and there's some (emphasis on some) semblance of sanity in the White House, so that feels a bit better. so why not get a clean scan, cancer-free, tra la la? or, a stable scan. stable would indicate a better March as well. it is weird what passes for "better" these days. 

so yeah, waiting on scans and appointments, waiting for treatment to work, that is all pretty fucking terrible. But for me right now, it is the thinking part that is doing me in. i hope i can at some point find a way to calm myself, a way that i actually can put to use. i suppose something like that comes with acceptance, though. and even after all this time of living with it, a small part of my brain reserves the right to live in a more pleasant world where none of it ever happened.