As I write this I am about two and a half years out of my cancer diagnosis and treatment. Aside from a little skin cancer scare (which turned out was nothing) one could say I have been done with cancer. However, that is not exactly how it works in the cancer game.
There are so many questions as to when you are officially no longer a cancer patient. Was it the surgery? The chemo? When you quit going to an oncologist? Or when you finally pay off all your medical bills? (In which case I will never be done.) In many ways I no longer feel like a cancer patient, but at the same time, at the beginning of every month I look at my calendar and see what doctors appointments I have this round. It is hard to feel "well" or "cured" when you are sitting in a waiting room all of the time. I mean who needs a People magazine subscription when you can read it for free every month while you wait for the nurse to call your name? The good news is the frequency of the appointments slowly grows further and further apart. I think I am down to CT scans once a year now (so I only have to drink a half gallon of nasty tasting water a year).
The funny thing is, because of the doctors' good reports you feel like your not well. Because of the type of work I do, I tend to run into people that I haven't seen for months or even a year and they always ask how I am doing With the frequency of doctors appointments my answer is usually,"Well, I was just at the doctor and they said I was fine." That is the Catch 22 of being in monitoring, you have to see an "ist" each month (oncologist, urologist, gastroenterologist, etc.) but at least they say you are doing good each time. You don't feel like you can say "Oh, the cancer thing is over." because you are still seeing an oncologist, but at the same time you don't feel like a real cancer patient because you are not having to go through any treatment.
On one hand, it is nice to have the peace of mind every month that you are safe for four more weeks. On the other hand things get so routine, you wonder why you are paying more and more for something you could probably do yourself at this point. Heck, I am in and out of my urologist's office so fast, I could probably just drive by his office slowly with my scrotum hanging out the car window and toss out my co-pay.
I think the biggest part of not feeling "over" cancer is the mental aspect of it. Every bump, twitch, even feeling tired when you don't think you should makes you wonder if just maybe it's something bigger. And not even your thoughts are safe. My one-year-old had been going through a phase where he wants me to hug me, or have me hold him, or just lean against me. Most people would just understand it is the clingy phase that all toddlers go through, but my mind wondered if he wasn't sensing something, that maybe I wouldn't be around much longer and he needed to get his quality time in while I was still alive.
Even happy dreams aren't safe. I know two people that have flatlined on operating tables and come back to life. They both tell of people that have died greeting them at the end of the tunnel and telling them that it's not their time yet to go back to earth. I have had some friends die and some family members die, but only one person in my life has died that I saw everyday, and would spend an hour just talking to everyday about whatever. Well, that person was in my dream the other night. He welcomed me into Heaven, showed me around, and we picked up on conversations we started before he died. I woke up feeling so good knowing that if I died, this person would be the one that brought me through the tunnel and took me to see my other friends and family that have already passed. But that good feeling quickly turned to dread, as I wondered why I was dreaming about dying and does my body know something that it hasn't shared with my brain yet. Maybe part of my brain does know and it is just not sharing the information with the rest of my brain the same way it does when I ask it where I put the car keys.
The biggest joy I have in life is watching my son play, which we weren't even sure we were going to be able to have when all this started. Even while sitting there just watching him run around like a drunk kamikaze gymnast, I worry about recurrence and not being around to watch him grow up. Or not being around and maybe his only memory of me will be me yelling at him to quit splashing in the dogs' water dish (which to be fair is something I do approximately 1500 times everyday).
So am I done with cancer? The doctors say "yes" but then tell me to schedule an appointment to come back and make sure it's still "yes". Physically, outside of underwear not fitting quite the way it used to, I feel like I am done with cancer. Mentally, the chemo fog has cleared up, but there is always that cancer cloud hanging over me, just like a summertime meteorologist's permanent "30% chance of storms". The ironic thing is the more my son shines the more I worried I get about that cancer cloud. But until then I will enjoy every second I get to spend with my son, even the hours on end I spend pulling him out of the dog dish, and hopefully live long enough to teach him how to check for testicular cancer on himself one day.
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