Challenges

There really isn't anything that prepared me for the breast cancer diagnosis. Similarly, there isn't anything that prepared me for life after the diagnosis or life during the treatments ... or life after the treatments.

Sometimes talking to someone else who has been there is a big help. I don't feel like I need therapy ... well at least not most days! I don't want to go to a support group. But. I sometimes feel like I am the only person in the world who is experiencing shit side effects from the breast cancer treatments and also the mental, emotional and spiritual changes ... that are constant.

I had a double mastectomy. Am taking Tamoxifen. Am as big as a fucking house. Partly due to the original chemo and then lack of energy and no exercise and then the Tamoxifen. I broke up a long time relationship a couple of years before the diagnosis ... I bring up that up because these days I would really like to go out on a date or something, but I am like, well, where do I meet someone at my age and then when I do meet someone when do I bring up the fact that the boobs I have are removable?

People ask, "Have you written anything with regard to your experience?" I started this blog to get some stuff out and to share with my family and my friends how I was feeling so they didn't have to feel uncomfortable about asking me stuff. Then I got tired of talking about it, but crap, you live it whether you talk about it or not.

What's so weird is that as a cancer survivor you feel lucky. You are grateful to have life and to have come out on the other side of the treatment. The flip side is that there's some guilt. Okay, maybe that's just me, the Catholic thing and all.

There's also frustration and confusion.

After your hair grows back and a couple of years goes by, you think you should be all better. Get on with life. Do what you used to do. You think that you are back to "normal" and your expectations of yourself are that you are -- but the chemo and the cancer and the worry and the post-chemo treatments take a toll.

There you are looking at yourself in the mirror and you see yourself ... but then somedays it seems like that reflection ... it isn't really you ... or is it? No matter what, you really never are who you were before the diagnosis.

All that said, I feel so much better now than I did a year ago, and I try to celebrate my survivorship daily. An occasional funk is natural, I think, but I always say to myself, at least I am alive to be cranky, crabby, to feel fat, to be annoyed ... etc.

The good thing about surviving cancer is that life does go on.