What a difference a week makes. Babies are born and life irrevocably changes; school starts and summer quickly fades to a bittersweet memory; biopsies come back and suddenly you (or at least certain body parts) are part of a new, unsolicited category of the population.
That's what happened to me and my family. An annoying (yes, that's how I viewed it), costly medical procedure that I thought was a formality revealed cancer.
I don't write nearly enough--hence the title of this blog. I too often get trapped in my own brain and the rattling and bumping of thoughts produces more anxiety then is necessary. So as I logged on to the blog today I was surprised to see an entry I'd started last fall. Even then I had cancer on the brain--maybe only as a point of illustration, but it was part of my schema nonetheless.
I wrote those three paragraphs less than a month ago. Wow, if I thought I'd lost a layer of naiveté in a a week, a month of being a student of this crazy disease makes me feel simultaneously like an energized rhetorical sage--I can now proficiently spout all the necessary terms and phrases needed to appear that I know what's gong on and it's kinda of fun to play that role, if I'm being honest--and a tired pup since playing the part of the medical intern gets really tiring really quickly and at the end of it all the blasted cancer is still there.
So what's changed? Well, my hopes of having a simple little lumpectomy and radiation have morphed into a bilateral mastectomy. I was and still am completely uninterested in taking such drastic measures, but it seems to be the wise choice. Pardon the metaphor, but in a base sense my diagnosis has become like my fourth child. We are in the newborn phase where the youngster drains me of all my energy, keeps me up at night and shows no awareness for how it's existence is changing everyone else's. But the thing about the newborn phase, especially for first time parents, is that while we think it's the hardest part of parenting, as soon as our kids get beyond it and approach adolescence, we quickly realize that all the sleep in the world does not compare to the energy needed to parent an older child. I am that first time parent with this new addition--I think I'm tired now an that my body has been compromised but I haven't got a clue as to what's in store for me. Maybe I'll spring back quickly and make it look "easy" like I did with my own newborns, refusing to wear maternity clothes home from the hospital. But maybe I won't. Maybe I'll be the woman who never looks like she did pre-pregnancy. Either way, fitting into my jeans-or my tops-is so trivial compared to the real transformation that's about to talk place, the internal one. There were many moments in each of my children' newborn lives that I did not handle well. Instead of grace and dignity, frustration and fzrazzledness prevailed. I'd like the chance to have a redo. That's my prayer (in addition to complete healing, of course!: that I could handle this newborn phase with a maturity and calmness that is not based on the ease of my circumstances. Lets face it: compared to so many on this journey, my circumstance are a cake walk. As my husband reminded me, as difficult as my choice to have the double mastectomy was, I at least had a choice. May I walk with purpose, that which is not my own, but which has been a merciful gift to me.
