Cracked Pot Meditations – Cancer Anniversaries

Meditation for September 2nd, 2016

Cancer Anniversaries

Tomorrow (the 4th) will be the two year anniversary since I walked into the hospital with chest pains and was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. I looked up some forums about people dealing with the milestones and most survivors were saying to take it easy because it’s hard.

Relief

There is a relief that time has gone by. I have this weird perception of time like all of this happened years and years ago while it happened yesterday. I feel relief that I am not going through surgeries and chemo anymore.

Fear

It reminds me that I’ll probably get cancer again and then die. I am scared that my tests next month will be negative and I will have to endure more treatment, poking and prodding. I am scared of never ever being normal. I am scared that you are tired of hearing me talk about cancer. I’m going to die, but goddamnit, I want to die on my terms, not cancer’s terms.

Sad

Looking back at cancer and the treatment, I feel like I lost a lot. I lost a lot of me. I keep thinking that this me that I haven’t felt in two years will be back and I can get on with my life, but that me hasn’t shown back up. I feel sad because while a lot of other people have had cancer, and the people in my life are supportive and loving, I walk the cancer walk alone a lot of times.

I miss my wit and my head working better than it does now. I miss my body working. I feel like my body is broken and it’ll never ever return to it’s old shape – mostly because I am old now.

I miss my creativity that I had before chemo took the edges off my brain. I sometimes get sad that I didn’t take full advantage of my creativity before it got softened by the poisons I had injected into my body to kill the cancer.

Anger

You better believe I am angry. I get angry that I had to deal with this at all. I get angry that I worked really hard to build a life that I was living before I was diagnosed, only to have it completely shattered for no reason at all. A lot of other parts of my life that have been negative have been the results of my bad decisions and not my body completely betraying me.

I get angry at the hippies that tell me that all I needed was a certain kind of berry or a belly full of THC butter and I would have not have had cancer or needed the treatment for it. I get angry at the libertarians that want to take health care away. I was one of the lucky ones who had insurance and I am looking at thousands of dollars of debt. I get mad at the people who casually dismiss cancer as any serious thing. I get mad when people complain of small things. I get mad at myself when I complain of small things.

Anger is easy. This is what I feel over the sadness and the hurt. Cancer really fucked me up and I’m still trying to get through. I have an appointment in October to see if I am in remission. I feel anger that I have to continue to watch for cancer popping up.

Tired

I am tired a lot of times. This is beyond the physical anguish my body has had to endure with the chemo, surgeries and medications, but just a down to the bones exhaustion that I feel everyday. I work very early in the morning, so I really feel that deep down fatigue before the sun is up. My job is very physical and I feel so beat at the end of my shift. Yesterday my eyes were rolling up into my head I was so tired after work.

I never feel like I’ve gotten the rest I needed after these last two years. In some ways I have started to get on with my life and other ways I feel stuck in recovery.

Survived

I survived. I survived a reality that most people never experience. Being sick really sticks you into the now and no amount of past, future or fiction will help you escape that. I am now two years away from that fucked up day at the hospital being told that I have a fatal disease, and that removing a teste, pumping poisons into your body and then scooping out guts so that some lymph nodes can be cut out will save your life – maybe – and I survived all of that.

Sometimes I feel like a goddamned hero surviving that and other times I just feel like I went to the hospital and did exactly what the doctors told me to do. I just showed up and endured.

Two years ago my life changed. I got to experience reality and pain like few do. Now I am back to being ungrateful and annoyed all the time.