Post Chemo Days

         

If you squint you can see some fuzz on my head.

My chemo officially ended on January 2^nd, so it’s been almost four weeks, and much longer than that since I have posted here. I apologize for the long silence. I think I’ve been depressed.

The side effects have not ended. Obviously I’m still bald, but the nausea just goes on and on.

• Neuropathy: tingling fingers and toes. Still happening.

• Expanders: still hurting.

• Fatigue: I am always tired.

• Nothing tastes right, especially coffee, which tastes bitter instead of strong, or smooth, or heartening.

• For Christmas I got a scorching case of rosacea on my face and I can’t seem to get rid of it. I look like Bill Clinton.

• Hot flashes: I mostly don’t wear my wig because my head gets too hot and the sweat rolls down my face and then I look like Bill Clinton when he looked in the camera and tried to redefine “sexual relations." Just a sweaty, red-faced mess.

I think, I honestly think, that I believed that chemo would end, two weeks (the length of time that I went between infusions) would pass, and I would feel totally normal, except with foobs and no hair. I also thought that I would feel grateful, or peaceful, or serene.

But these post chemo days have been pretty anti-climactic, pretty “now what?” I am not sure how to explain exactly, but unfortunately I have not felt grateful, or serene, or peaceful. Sometimes I have felt relieved.

The truth is that I am still very afraid. I don’t have cancer for now, but it could come back. Metastatic cancer is what I’ve been reading about and thinking about—cancer that spreads into the rest of your body, that can’t be cured, that you just have to manage and treat continuously. I have to figure out a way to live with this fear and come to some kind of peace with the fact that I just don’t know what will happen. And I have to raise a son and be fully engaged with him. And I have to be a librarian and be fully engaged with my job. And I feel obligated to support Andrew and I don’t know how to best help him, now that he is out of the hospital, doing follow-up therapy and taking his medicine.

As for next steps: tomorrow is my last expansion. In a week or so I will start Tamoxifen, which will increase the hot flashes, I’m sure. I will have follow-up exams and blood draws with my oncologist every three months for a year or two, which means my port stays in. Sometime this summer, probably, I will swap my expanders for implants and maybe get some fipples tatooed on what my plastic surgeon gracefully refers to as "the breast mound."

In other news, I am watching Downton Abbey with Andrew on Sunday nights—a longtime ritual for us, one that we have welcomed back into our lives. Jamie is working his way through Harry Potter, with irregular detours into Captain Underpants and Origami Yoda. 

Reminds me of Raymond Carter’s baker and what he had to say about small good things.