"NED"

I'm in a funk.  I will just open with that, because this should be the happiest, most celebratory post I have written to date, so I want to set the stage at the outset.

I shared my great news widely: my post-surgery pathology came back clean!  Like, ridiculously clean.  Here is the excerpt from my report and I literally could not ask for a better, more beautiful post-surgery report than this one.  My surgical oncologist delivered the news and I think she and my mom were a little taken aback that I wasn't rejoicing more.

I said, through teary eyes..."I think this would feel a lot better if I didn't feel like garbage."

So there you have it.  I felt relieved.  I had been waiting to exhale, and I exhaled.  But I wasn't, like, elated?  Moderately excited?

The truth is that my body feels chewed up and spit out.  As I told my chemo buddy, this surgery recovery is miserable, in a completely different way than chemo was.  It seems that "two weeks" is the magic time frame for all things cancer related. Two weeks until I felt semi-normal after each chemo treatment.  Two weeks (allegedly) until I will feel better after surgery.  I'm living life in two week increments, vacillating between "horrible" and "not so horrible" with bouts of "decent" but it is all in a quest to return to pre-normal and I wonder how much I actually want that.  Because "pre-normal" was also "ignorant" or "naive" of what was happening inside my body.

I am ready to be back to spending time with my kids, when they don't look at me cautiously or fearfully.  Driving.  Participating in life. Not moving gingerly.  Not living in a recliner.  Not feeling perpetually exhausted. Not feeling beat up.  But I am also terrified of going back to acting like life is good, like my body doesn't know how to make cancer.  It is so freaking scary.

I am told that it gets better with each passing year.  I won't lie, Shannen Dougherty's news yesterday that her cancer came back as stage IV has me shaken.  Shook, actually.  I watched her interview where she said "our life doesn't end when we get that diagnosis.  We still have some living to do."  I think between this, Kobe's helicopter tragedy, practically any story on the news, my sister's horrible car accident (thank God she's fine), it's hard to truly celebrate a notion of immortality.

It's probably not helping that I've also continued to be assaulted by medications that I'm not used to.  I traded in all of the chemo meds for an antibiotic, pain killers, anti-inflamatories, stool softeners, benadryl (because the tape has me itchy everywhere), and valium.  And that is after being sedated for 5-6 hours for surgery and having a nerve block in my back for four days.  And because it can't be easy, the nerve block leaked under my skin and left a sore and wide spreading bump in my back.

I still have the drain in, which is the actual worst.  It leaves a constant, deep ache at the top of my rib cage on the mastectomy side.  I ache at the incision sites, which take up the entire latitude of both breasts plus a vertical cut on the lifted side.  My mastectomy side looks like the outline of the expander (tight, lumpy, veiny), and it feels like you would expect it would feel.  I was never particularly proud of or attached to my breasts before, but they were functional and not...well, cut up and numb on the outside and sore and itchy on the inside. Reading the pathology report about how they dissect the removed breast to check for disease was REALLY disarming.

I am SO grateful to be "NED" - "no evidence of disease" aka "remission" aka "cancer free." I am SO grateful to have so much support - physical and emotional - from friends and family across the country.  I'm thankful that my mom and Jay have stepped up so much to make my kids continue feeling secure.  I'm thankful that my oncologist made good on her promise to cure me.  I'm thankful that I won't have to have radiation.  I'm thankful that, according to my breast surgeon and plastic surgeon, everything in surgery went and looks great.

But I think I need a few "moments" to let myself re-calibrate, heal, and bounce back.  Forgive me if my posts have more exclamation points than I am actually feeling.  I love that you all are celebrating with me on the culmination of another HUGE step of this journey.

A family member sent the cuff that headlines this post.  "You were given this life because you're strong enough to live it."  That really touched me and has been something to think on over the last couple of days.  In that vein, I have been taking pictures of the beauty that surrounds me on the (otherwise infuriating) trips into DC for doctor follow ups.  I have always been known to be an optimist, after all.

This wasn't meant to be my next blog post, but it is what has been weighing on my mind.