Wow where has the time gone! Last time I checked I was only a month out of Radiation and my hair resembled a very short buzz cut.
Now all of a sudden we’re more than halfway through November and I actually have a legitimate hairstyle! Yes folks, I have a hairstyle. Also, I’d like to take a moment and let everyone know that the other morning I woke up with bed-head. YES, BED HEAD!! That means that I have long enough hair for it to actually be messy – I am pumped!! Who knew you could be pumped about bed-head. It’s all about the little things right?
Despite how exciting it is that it’s growing out, it’s becoming quite awkward. Not the hairstyle itself, but the fact that people now can reasonably assume that I chose the hairstyle. I find it comical when I think about how someone might see me and wonder why on earth I would cut off my beautiful almost-touching-my-butt long hair and turn it into the shortest pixie cut there ever was. I’m probably a little coo-coo in their minds currently. Wait till they get to see my bob, that’s next on the hairstyle list (although I’m probably a good 6 months out on that one).
Somehow my days went from chemo side effects and hospital visits to being back at work, picking up my regular exercise routine, and making future plans, and hanging out with friends. Part of me does feel different, but I generally am finding that I need to almost remind myself of what happened to me. It feels like someone pressed the “pause” button on my life on February 7, 2018 and then pressed “play” again somewhere around the middle of October. In between that time I blacked out.
It's like the kind of blackout you get when you go out with you girlfriends and the shots are flowing and you take just one more shot and then all of a sudden the next thing you know you wake up in your party clothes on your living room carpet with pizza in your hand and realize that the last thing you remember was jammin out on the dfloor having a great time. The period of time between bustin some moves to R&B jams (in which my moves are questionable) to waking up looking at your pizza is dubbed the "blackout period". Life stopped and started during that time, and your mind has already stamped and filed those memories to a place in which you threw the key into the forest to never be found again.
I almost feel like my mind is trying so hard to forget the awful 8 months that it just wants to convince me that I blacked out. Instead of lying on my living room floor with pizza in my hand though I'm waking up placed right back to where I left off on February 6th, 2018 - back on the dfloor having a great time . My mind is in process to trying to find a way to file the memories so that they can be locked up and I can never access it again. They key to the files hasn't been thrown in the forest yet, but that time feels like it's in the near future.
Wait, I went through Chemotherapy?? No way! That’s crazy!
I had my life turned upside down? Are you kidding! That never happened.
I struggle trying to decide if it’s a bad thing that I have pretty much gone right back to where I left off. I don’t really do much differently than I did before I got sick, except I do try to break the bank more often on organic food than before. I have a desire to be broke for the rest of my life apparently, oh and I also bought probably $200 worth of vitamins - cool. But then other than that, I’m not really doing anything out of the ordinary, or anything different than before. Should I be? Should I have taken away from this experience some amazing motivation to do something extraordinary?
Sometimes I let myself see the memories of the last 8 months vividly and it brings a huge wave of confusion over me. Finally I’m back at it and feeling like “me”, doing well at my job, having fun, getting back to the things I love, but then every so often I have the reminder of what I went through and I stop and say to myself “wait, shouldn’t my life be different now – why does it feel the same?”
And if I don’t go off and do anything extraordinary, then is the whole experience I went through worth nothing? Have I not grown at all as a person, or learned anything that could better my life now? I heard that cancer can make people do amazing things – why don’t I feel amazing?
These types of thoughts consume me sometimes. On most days I try to pretend that nothing happened and I can rely on the “I blacked out” story that my mind keeps trying to make me believe. Sometimes I’ll see a breast cancer awareness ad and it won’t even resonate with me. But then other days I’ll get hit with the thought like a punch in the stomach and remind myself “oh right – that’s me, I had breast cancer, duh”.
And then what worries me the most is the deep emotional scars that are probably still there, and may always be there, just waiting for the opportune time to pounce. The more I forget about what I went through, the more I am caught off guard when my emotions are triggered. I haven’t fully figured out what all the triggers are yet and that’s worrisome. Sometimes it can be a simple empathetic sentence said by someone, or even just the energy I feel in a situation. Sometimes I get hit with an overwhelming mourning for the person I was before. I miss her a lot, she was free spirited in a way that I know I’ll never be again. I can’t dwell on this thought though, it’s not going to get me anywhere because I know there is no going back – but my mind does squeeze in the upsetting realization every so often and it hits me harder than anything has really hit me before. It’s almost like I can feel my heart hurt.
But hey, let’s not go down negative Nancy lane right now. I’d rather skip down positive Polly street, and I do on the majority of days! To be honest, life is GREAT. I have so much to be thankful for. The fact that I have nicely settled back into my life to the point where i almost have forgotten I even had cancer, is a huge blessing.
Somehow I got to the other side of all of this, and I am ready to live my life again. Whether I blacked out or not, I’ve been able to reach a level of happiness each day that keeps me movin’ and groovin’ and I feel like I’m back up to full steam (hair included now!).
And you better bet that Anna and I rebooked our Sri Lanka trip that we had to cancel last year because of my epic timing to be diagnosed with Breast Cancer. OBVIOUSLY there is NEVER a good time to be diagnosed, but having to cancel that trip like that was soul crushing.
So here we go again! March 2019 comin’ in hot.