I’ve been trying to write this one for a while now, and it’s honestly been one of the hardest blog posts to write. Throughout this entire thing, I had read a little here and there about survivorship, mostly noting how some people find it even harder than having cancer itself. “That will never be me, I’m cut from a different cloth,” I told myself.
I handled cancer remarkably well, and I have enough perspective and self-awareness to understand that. So, of course I was expecting survivorship to go just as smoothly, if not be even easier. When I first started writing down my thoughts for this post, the first line I wrote was “There’s this weird dissonance now that I’m in the after.” I wrote that over two weeks ago and it’s just been sitting here while I reflect on it and continue trying to understand it. And then my “marathonaversary” happened a little over a week ago, and I thought “today is the day I organize these thoughts,” and was going to link October 8, 2017 at the Chicago Marathon to October 8, 2026 running a mile on the treadmill with my post-surgery accoutrements (a silk scarf wrapped around my sports bra to protect my huge midline scar, and a hernia belt to keep my HAI pump from jumping around while I run) and discuss the dissonance between the two. But even that felt so surface-level compared to what’s really going on.
It’s easy, and more notably, natural for me, to put on a confident happy face as I proudly tell people who ask how I am, that I’m “Great! Feeling amazing, the cancer is gone and I’m all better!” because the honest answer is so much more nuanced than that.
When cancer was actively happening to me, it was so easy to be brave and just hit everything head on, because there was always actively something to do about it. I was excited to go to chemo every other week, because not only would we be actively fighting it, but also actively monitoring it through bloodwork. Between oncology appointments, scans, chemo, pre-op appointments, and even through surgery, there was always an action. And now? Now that stuff is coming at 3 month intervals instead of 2 week intervals, so the unknown period is so much longer. And while I should be getting my Signatera test results in about a week (the test where they took a slice of Krang, my own bloodwork, and can look for traces of Krang’s DNA in my blood potentially before a recurrence would become visible on a scan), it feels like I’m suspended somewhere between the relief of being cancer-free and the fear of what I can’t see coming. And that’s not even the biggest struggle.
As I start to return to “normal life,” in my mind, I want to keep cancer, treatment, everything I went through this last year all separate from my regular life. But I also want it to influence my regular life; I don’t want those lessons I learned to simply disappear. I want to never think about it again, but I also don’t want people to forget that I went through it, and am still going through it. If I overlook something at work due to lingering brain fog, it feels contradictory to even acknowledge it, because aren’t I supposed to be better now? Residual oxaliplatin neuropathy continues to make my fingertips numb on occasion, something I’ve just gotten used to. And while I don’t normally talk about it, I’m quietly sitting there with what is essentially a flashing neon sign saying “Hey! Remember all that trauma you went through?” The strands of hair that fell out, thinning my hair, haven’t fully grown back yet and have been awkward since I got home from the hospital. Something that both frustrates me and fills me with enormous survivor’s guilt, because here I am, annoyed by an awkward inch of regrowth that most people can barely notice, while other cancer survivors have had to watch every last strand fall out. You would think that going through something so huge, it would be easy to not sweat the small stuff, but even the tiniest inconvenience (let alone actual catastrophes) triggers fight or flight. The emergency has ended, but my nervous system didn’t necessarily get the memo.
But the biggest thing I’ve been processing and working on is who I am after cancer. I’ve always been so fearless, especially when it comes to fun and having a good time. But now there’s an added layer of caution built in that is at odds with the person I knew before cancer. It’s been a struggle to truly enjoy everything I used to, now that I have confetti in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other. Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t be more grateful for how everything played out. But I’m realizing there’s a whole lot of fear and grief hiding under all that gratitude, sometimes making it difficult to make even the simplest decisions. Which isn’t the person I’m used to being. Of course I know there’s a lot of new badassery that comes with kicking stage 4 cancer, but learning how to merge that with the pre-cancer version of myself feels like I’m in the middle of a Marvel movie training montage. Except training montages in movies are montages for a reason; they’re speeding up the long, boring, monotonous work of becoming your best self. And when it’s real life and not a montage, that can feel like you’re trying to run in molasses.
So unlike a lot of blog entries in the past, this one doesn’t have a neat, tidy ending. Both this blog post and myself are a work in progress, trying to figure out where I fit into my old life, in a post-cancer body and mind. I’m somehow better than I was physically before cancer, and simultaneously worse than I was mentally before cancer. And for someone who’s spent the last nine months knowing exactly what she was fighting for, figuring out how to simply exist afterward might be the hardest part yet. Maybe being cut from a different cloth was never about how well I could hold it together, but how willing I am to acknowledge when I can’t.
Leave a Reply