My Big Fat Emotional See-Saw

I was REALLY UPSET yesterday, I guess you could tell?

My blinding left-eyebrow headache from last night is now gone, thanks to a good night's sleep. I have a little balance back. My attitude is one of resignation, a feeling I remember all too well from last year. Big sigh, buck up, square the shoulders, march toward the future.

Bless you, MaryAnn, for helping with the logistics of transportation, since they won't let me drive home all woozy from the anesthesia. It's stupid that getting there and back is the most difficult part of this very simple surgery, and I truly HATE having to impose on friends to drive me hither and yon, wasting their day as well as mine.

Thank you, both Mom & SIL Kellie, for offering to come out and take care of me if they do have to do the hysterectomy. I don't think for a minute that they will find cancer in their biopsy, but I have to do the prudent thing and let them go look for it. Knowing that I have a backup plan really helps on the calmness scale.

I've decided I'm not letting them take more parts in the name of "What if?" Yes, because of the tamoxifen I'm taking to hopefully prevent breast cancer recurrence, that puts me at higher risk for endometrial and uterine cancer. Yes, keeping my ovaries puts me at greater risk for B/C recurrence. But I get to be stubborn about some things. This is one of them. If we just started yanking out pieces that might become traitors in the future, I'd be left with a head on a bubbling fluid-chamber, like in those old sci-fi movies. And then, with my luck, I'd get brain cancer anyway.

Yesterday, my gyn told me I needed to do some soul-searching and decide how much of a risk-taker I wanted to be, versus how compulsively I fear more cancer. As far as I am concerned, life as I knew it ended last fall--it's all borrowed time now, the first real smack of mortality in my previous 55 years of risk-taking life. Anyone who knows me, knows I have spent my life doing stupid and risky things. But I am more fearful now, in general, than I have ever been in my life.

On the other side, the worst has already happened. I feared breast cancer so much that I never even entertained the idea that it might happen to me. In fact, I was convinced that I was immune. It was my "Room 101," the unthinkable nightmare that I shrank from, using daily denial and a false sense of proactive annual measures designed to convince myself that it would never happen to me. Yeah, THAT worked out really well...

I could try to eliminate everything that might give me more cancer in the future, and be felled by a heart attack or die in a car accident tomorrow. Or be hit by a bus. (editor's note: Why is it always a bus? I actually had a relative who died after being hit by a streetcar; does that count?)

Life is never without risk, and yes, no matter what we do, we all still die of something. I refuse to go out passive and cowed, living whatever time I have left cautiously and fearfully. That's not me.

So yesterday, denial. Today, anger. Once again on the treadmill of grief-stages, I plod along, just trying to enjoy myself in spite of the random nonsense swirling about. Onward.