Spam

I survived Taxol treatment #2. It was scary but I did better. The pain from treatment #1 left me feeling both haunted and hunted. This time, I had a new medicine and lower expectations for what the weekend would like. It was more like the flu rather than labor.  I have neuropathy now, in both my hands and feet, but this is a pretty common and manageable side effect. I'd take it anyday to the metabolic storm of red sunshine. 26 days and counting.

I feel tender and confused. I've been struggling with feelings of anger this last month and just this weekend, I feel like something has shifted, like I've passed through some kind of portal. I'm going to use this post to try to explain it to myself because as I write these words, I really am not sure exactly what has transpired.

I think the breast cancer has given me some kind of permission to process some latent anger I've been carrying around. Across the last month, I've had some very strange and unpredictable emotional thoughts and impulses. Like one day I fantasized about ripping all the pictures off the walls in my house. Another day I cried when I spilled a glass of iced tea. One night I wanted to break a wineglass on the flagstone step but was too lazy to clean it up and didn't want to explain it to anyone in the morning. It's been strange but I feel it connects to my a theory a friend shared when she heard my diagnosis. She's believes that my breast cancer is the last physical manifestation of my old life and relationship and that purging this tumor will purge me finally of all the ugliness that I endured. I'm beginning to think she's right.

From the waiting room on the surgeon's office, it occurred to me that I could no longer take emails directly from my ex. Sitting there with the news of this disease and it's awful reality crashing down around me, understood finally, in this do-or-die way, that I had to create some kind of a buffer for myself. By law, I'm required to coordinate money and schedules with him, and I'm happy to do that. It's my exposure (through email) to all the other stuff that has been sapping me; the constant demands for friendship, the rationalizations, the timelines, and the confessions, etc. These things no longer pertain to me and they haven't for quite some time yet I've been force fed of diet of information that I don't want or need. It can make a girl feel pretty angry and powerless. In response to all this, my brother-in-law mercifully volunteered to be my spam-catcher. This has been a collassal relief and I gigantic component in this shift I'm struggling to describe here. When I first set up the bounce, I wasn't confident that it was the ethical thing to do. Now with three months under my belt, I'm 100% sure that it is not only ethical but necessary. It's become the way that I've figured out how to put my own life mask on first. I realize now that it's been a very long time since I've been angry about how or why he left. I worked hard to understand that story and I do. This last plate of anger has been about the fact that though he wouldn't leave me alone.  I have a right to be pissed off about this. Who wouldn't? But now, I've got a solution. The bounce will continue into the forseeable future. I feel both empowered and newly at peace.

In the book Red Sunshine, the author talked about how she was excited to receive each treatment because it meant that she was doing battle with her disease. I, on the other hand, dread each treatment with every cell in my body. It feels intuitively wrong that I am compromising my overall good health for the sake of 4 rogue centimeters. But I'm beginning to develop this 'bring it' attitude about surgery. If my friend is right, this tumor is the physical manifestation of all of that grief and frustration. And there is no time like the present to get rid of it. Can't wait for October.