I can definitely see my sense of humour receding as per my blog posts these days…I do actually manage to laugh pretty much every day, see the absurd in the every day nonsense, take the piss out of myself and others. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I am getting worn down by the chemo. 

Perhaps it’s deliberate – I rarely think about my recovery from cancer, or cancer itself, because my whole world has become about chemo. Organizing it, the day of it, the side effects, everything I do to counter the side effects. And then try to fit the rest of my life in around that – surprising how much time chemo actually takes from your life. It’s a weird form of institutionalization – there is a bizarre comfort in this. I think for the very reason that you actually just can’t focus on anything else most of the time. 

Come March, I will be looking at surgery and then radiation. A whole other chapter – it will be new and scary. I will have to start wondering if I am cured or not, learning about things like ‘clear margins’ (something to do with whether they have removed all the cancer or not). Looking at the odds of recurrence, assuming I get the all clear. Learning about radiation – even just physically where I go for that, what will it feel like, new people to deal with. It’s daunting. If nothing else, chemo keeps me in the day – more often than not because the day is so fucking tough I have no other choice!

We are so incredibly adaptable as human beings. Never fails to amaze me. Chemo is hell, yet has become a way of life for me – and of course for so very many others. I live with it, I adapt to it, I suffer it, and I draw bizarre comfort in its familiarity when I think of the future. 

I’m scared today. Of the future. And I am so very, very tired. The two I have no doubt are linked – fatigue leads to being low. I feel alone, something that always accompanies fear with me – rarely, if ever the reality, but the feeling persists nonetheless. I resent the cancer, I resent what it had taken from me – and yet I also, albeit reluctantly right now, see what it has given me. It’s fucked up really – I can’t make much sense of it all most of the time, I think mainly because coping day to day takes up all my energy. I wonder how different it would be if I could just do nothing but focus on my healing – would it actually make a difference or not? Or is the life I am living now, for all its madness, my form of healing?