On this day two years ago, I had my final radiotherapy treatment. I wrote about my final treatments and the effects on my body at that time, noting that it was “getting boring” and that I wasn’t going to write about it anymore.
That was true for then, but what I wasn’t to know then was that two years later there are still lingering after-effects. When writing about my experience of cancer, I was reluctant to call it a ‘journey’. It’s such a hackneyed phrase, but also one I didn’t want to think of as relevant to me. I didn’t want a cancer journey, I wanted it to be done/finished/over. I wanted to close the chapter on that short part of my life and move on.
But it isn’t over; the chapter isn’t closed. The journey, such as it is, continues.
Not in big, sweeping gestures or debilitating treatments but in subtle ways that slink in around the edges, catching me off-guard.
I drive to one of four annual check-ups (breast surgeon, medical oncologist, radio oncologist, mammogram/ultrasound) and fight the rising panic by calling my daughter Emma or my sister Debbie. Emma drove me to many of my treatments and then to work or to home afterwards and can visualise where I am and that familiarity adds to the comfort she provides. Debbie takes me through the 5-4-3-2-1 technique forcing my focus elsewhere, away from the panic.
I take a pill everyday to help ensure the cancer doesn’t return. I try my hardest to get the same brand each month, but if it’s unavailable and I have to take a different brand my joints begin to ache within a few days, my legs swell, I get dizzy, my vision worsens.
I mention it to my radio oncologist at my annual check-up in March. She says many of her patients have noted the same thing. I’m glad it’s not just me; I was beginning to think it was all in my mind. She examines me and is surprised by the amount of pain I experience at her touch. ‘Things often start to get better from the 2-year mark’ she tells me. I’m sure she told me that at the end of the first year too.
My mammogram and ultrasound results have been fine so far. I am doing well. There is no need to worry.
So they say.
And then I let myself think of this as a journey … I know the starting point, that moment when I felt the lump for the first time. The six weeks that felt like many more between then and getting a diagnosis. The surgery, the healing, the radiotherapy, the pills, the annual checks, the regular massages, the lingering, push-it-to-the-furtherest-corner-of-your-mind fear that pops out every now and then … if this is a journey, what’s the destination?
I think about that for a while and decide that wellness is the destination.
If this is a journey, I want it to be a hopeful one. One with a destination I can look forward to. One I don’t ever want to go on again, but one I can think back on and feel comfortable in how I lived it.
I don’t want to pretend it’s all sunshine and roses, but it’s also not a journey full of menace or foreboding.
It’s a journey to wellness.
I can live with that.
Musings from the cold 