I haven't had a lot of time for reflection and perspective lately, but then it occurs to me that if I'm waiting for a chunk of time for things to slow down so that I can get said perspective, I'm going to be waiting for ages. And I don't have ages. Well, none of us do, technically.
I've been thinking a lot how I am now entering my 3rd year with this big fucking cancer thing in my life. I guess the whole time, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking that at some point, yeah, it's going to be over, the way it's always been in my life (or at least I thought) --- you know, you go through something that seems impossibly hard, sometimes unbearably so, and you take Churchill's advice to "keep going," and eventually, there you are on the other side of it.
You are wiser and stronger and sadder maybe, but the worst of the storm has surely passed. Now you pick up the pieces that need picking up. Now you pay attention more and you see how there's something like lightness coming in to balance things out. This has been my experience up until now and I guess this is how I thought the world worked. No one was spared difficulty, but if you steeled your way through -- and there always did seem to be a way through -- you were met on the other side with something softer. Ebb and flow of life, all in balance, etc. etc.
It's just -- this thing, I realized now, I may not ever get through. It might be something un-get-throughable. One bad year becomes two and two bad years turn into a lifestyle of sorts. And all the why?questions are still unanswerable. All of the anger at the bad luck of it has not abated. It's a very weird place to be.
In my in-treatment cancer support group, I met a woman who was also going through ovarian cancer. She had been diagnosed stage IV and had just completed her first year since diagnosis, and was already on her third kind of chemo because the first two were not doing anything for her.
I wanted to reach out and I tried a little -- I sponsored her in one of those Cancer 5K thingies -- wrote her a few emails -- but it's hard -- because you never know how private people want to be about what's going on. She was gracious, but very guarded, so I did not push anything. When I hadn't seen her in our Zoom group for a while, I looked up her name and found her obituary. It was surprising and not surprising. It was devastating and not. She had been diagnosed after me and did not even make it to two years. This is just the deal with OC. Some stage IV people live for a decade. Some for not even a year.
And it hits home of course, that it could have easily been me. And so while I'm seriously hopeful about the immunotherapy trial I'm on, I'm also constantly, chronically aware that if it doesn't work, or if it works for a little while and then stops working (which has been a pattern with me so far), I'm going to be in a pretty hard place. I'm not going down that dark rabbit hole today, but as ever the difficulty in living lies in knowing how close I am to not living.
Every day, especially now as I feel pretty good, I try to live as "normally" as possible -- doing freelance work, walking my sister's dog, writing poems, talking to my mom. But compartmentalizing that awareness of the reality of my situation, that takes more energy than I care to mention. Not to let in the thoughts, about funerals and wills and what I'd be leaving to the world and why me -- it is some days so tremendously heavy.
But listen. this trial is a good trial. Immunotherapy is good stuff. On the days I get an infusion, I wear a t-shirt with an image of a monoclonal antibody on it (it's actually a really pretty design!), to you know, show my support. I try to think of any reactions as good signs that my immune system is gearing up, learning new stuff about fighting off the enemy. I have to spend time in this positive place, too.
None of any of this is new stuff -- in fact it's practically all I write about here, the whys and the weight and the waiting. the lethality and the longing (forgive my alliteration -- i have spent far too much time in my life writing ad copy). I now have something close to 100 (!!) poems about it (what to do with them is a whole other post). So maybe there's not some "other side"to get to -- maybe the way the world works is less about being borne through things, and more about integrating whatever it is that happens to show up. Even if what shows up is an absolute shitshow. Maybe especially then.
TOO MUCH THINKING. I need to go eat baked goods and sass the TV.
More later....
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