A note to the Metastatic Cancer Babes, in response to someone who has just had another rediagnosis, and hit the wall -
I'm also a shower cryer, and a friend has recently lost someone to glioblastoma, dammit.
I had been saving eggshells in a jar on the windowsill and I had no idea why. They were brown, and pretty. We made a bunch of other recycled jars and wine bottles into all the awful things we'd been though - cancer, death, seizures, loss of trust, -heart surgery, chemotherapy...I marked them with sharpie markers. Some of them were silly - Pants on the Ground. My friend, whose dad it was who died, made about SIX that just said SEIZURES. The cancer one had walnuts in it because they are so hard to break. The death one was full of the eggshells - so fragile. The loss of trust I filled with icky toadstools from the yard, and fabulous poisonous blue metallic berries. I told her NOT to let her kids touch them, much less play with them. The brain tumors jar has an orange and a lime. What a stupid comparison - how about, it's the size of a small hand grenade? An orange is way too fucking benign.
Deardra is having the hardest time with RAGE. So we are planning to take all the bottles and heave rocks at them, as hard as we can throw. Until they are all broken. Thoroughly.
I have now topped up to my sixth round of treatment - three rounds of chemo, seven weeks of radiation to my chest, ribcage, and front and back of collarbone, and two gamma knife surgeries.
The trouble with having a reputation for being brave and cheerful is when I'm NOT - it's when I'm grieving or mad RAGE RAGE RAGE or in denial and the real answer to How are you? is FUCK YOU! FUCK CANCER! FUCKING JUNGLE!! FUCKING QUICKSAND! STEROIDS SUCK, AND I HATE YOU! I hate this, I hate CANCER, and this SUCKS! So you might have to resort to movies and martinis. For me it's pre-mixed margaritas, and the people who really, really understand..and NOT the toxic types.
Right now my rageful friend is a tonic - I can be as mad, hateful and grumpy as I want, and she just grins. Then the next day she is mad, hateful and grumpy, and I get it. Those friends where you can call and say, I need to VENT, and they say I GET IT...call them. And have a gin and tonic. I am gammagirl, my survivor friend who actually had glioblastoma is gliomagirl, and if I ask for a double vodka on the rocks at 11 am once every six months she DOES NOT FUCK WITH ME, she just gives me a vodka and cranberry juice. Or a margarita. And lets me vent.
We are navigating a path no one else has before. No one survived this cancer in the way we are..they ALL DIED... until about 8 years ago. Truly, three percent were alive after fifteen years, and that is LESS than the typical rate of spontaneous remission in the average cancer, which is five to ten percent. Breast cancer,when it returned, was a serious killer, until between 2002 and 2005. We are all making it up as we go along, and navigating the hard parts as well as the BRAVE parts is apparently something we all have to figure out. I wish you luck, and broken rageful and grief bottles if you need them.
xoxo,
Chris