I start radiation today and I’m all up in my feelings about it. At least in part, it’s because it feels like one more assault on my body that I have to endure. It has been a long, hard year with so many assaults. It has been wearing on me for a while now.
I endured chemo and all the nasty side effects that come along with it, for five months. I used to joke about how my “reward” for enduring all of that was a double mastectomy.
And of course, the surgery had its own complications and surprises. (I really hate surprises now.) The recovery and the God-Awful Drains. I finally moved past those and now here we are: the next big phase of treatment. My final reconstruction surgeries will happen at least six months after radiation is complete. That feels a lifetime away, but I suppose so did radiation at one point.
There’s one thought that keeps coming back to me over and over as I think about all that has transpired over the last year: the price I have to pay to continue to live. It has felt like an incredibly high price at different points. Don’t get me wrong - it beats the alternative (as my Great Grandmother used to say) - and I’m fully willing to do it, but it’s a high price.
I’ve never had to give much thought to what I have to be willing to do in order to keep living. I’ve been incredibly fortunate. And maybe I should have thought about it. In hindsight, I definitely should have. But to me, it seems that the ultimate privilege of life is to be able to take it for granted.
I have a friend who underwent the double mastectomy months before I did. Thankfully she did not have to have chemo or radiation, so she’s moving on with her life now. It’s a different kind of transition out of the fight that I’m currently in. I’m still in the phase where I’m Googling “lung metastasis symptoms” in the middle of the night because I’ve had a cough since the smoke from the forest fires.
She tells me that she has days where she doesn’t think about cancer at all. I have trouble imagining what that’s like, but I hope that those days are ahead, off in a distant future for me.
I’m grateful for modern medicine and that the prognosis for my type of cancer is so good for so many. But I also believe that years from now we’ll look back at this treatment protocol - this chemotherapy that robs you of your dignity in so many ways, this massive and disfiguring surgery, and this radiation that leaves you tired and burned - and we’ll think it was so barbaric. We’ll think of it as akin to bloodletting or using leeches. But it’s the best we have now, and for a huge percentage of people (so I’m told), it works.
“It’s a year (or more) of your life and then you move on,” they say.
And so I begin the last big phase of treatment. It’s the price to pay.