It's the equinox in a few days and the wind is starting to pick up even now - and it's got jolly cold over the last few days - those of us with no hair know this very well! I am mostly over the side-effects of the last round of chemo, just in time to get them all back again on Wednesday.
I've been musing a lot over the last few days on just how quickly the last few months seem to have passed. When they told me that I have cancer I couldn't think beyond the next five minutes - talk of nearly five months of treatment didn't really form a coherent image in my mind. When I did start to think about it, it seemed like half a lifetime - nearly half a year anyway. And now I am more than half way through, two thirds in fact. In a month I will have had the last chemotherapy treatment of this regime - hopefully the last one ever, assuming that the drugs have done their work properly. If all is well, there will be one operation and then it will be done and dusted, and I will be a "cancer survivor" instead of a "cancer patient" - a subtle distinction but an important one. Then I will be left to get on with the rest of my life... But will that be all there is to it? Even if the cancer is all gone, I will be going back to the hospital for check-ups every few months for at least five years. I will also have to live with the knowledge that it might recur - or that whatever genetic weakness causes breast cells to go bad is in my underlying structure, and the switch might get thrown again. It's not unheard of for breast cancer survivors to experience a second primary cancer elsewhere, often the other breast. That knowledge will be with me for the rest of my life, and it's quite an uncomfortable thought.
But what if it hasn't all gone according to plan? The lump is undeniably reduced - the oncologist said he couldn't accurately measure it last time, and three weeks later I can barely find it myself... but that doesn't mean that it will all be gone by the end of the treatment. He can't find any evidence of anything in the local lymph nodes, but that doesn't mean that they won't find anything when they cut me up - what happens then? I guess it will mean more chemo, maybe radiotherapy, and still there will be a good chance of a good outcome, but again it's an uncomfortable thought. The medics are all very upbeat, still confident that it will all be fine, but there are no guarantees, and it's a bit like the fear that Santa might not actually bring the presents after all, even though I have been good and taken my medicine as I should. It's quite depressing - but I half feel that I am being unreasonable worrying about such things. Is this showing disloyalty, or lack of faith in my care team, doubting that they have fixed everything? I know that most of the time a single regime of chemo plus surgery is enough... but not always. And that little bit of doubt will probably never go away.
It's odd to think that this has been a summer of real upheavals - cancer, redundancy - but life has never seemed so bright and so precious... I am not sure which is the cause and which is the effect. Am I grasping life and making the most of it because I am painfully aware that life is a commodity with a finite supply? Or is it that I have become aware of the wonderful life that I have, the great people and the support that they are giving me, which is showing that life is still peachy in spite of the challenges that I am facing right now? I don't know for sure, a bit of both I guess. One thing is for sure, as the equinox approaches and heralds not only strong winds but also the start of the settling down into the approaching winter, I will be making the most of the autumn of this year, taking the fruits of the summer and putting them into storage for the winter (in the form of jam, chutney and sloe gin!). It may be the autumn of the year but I refuse to let it feel like the autumn of my life, so I am planning for the winter and for the spring beyond.
Carpe diem!
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