Daily Archives: February 9, 2013
So yesterday afternoon thinking about my preliminary diagnosis, I was a bad-ass warrior. I was sassy, and I had a take no prisoners attitude.
Last night, not so much. Last night, I’m constantly on the verge of crying, if I’m not flat out doing so. It doesn’t help matters that there is a TON of information on the internet, and I am obsessively searching and reading about things that only serve to confuse me more. I can’t keep doing this. I have to be patient, wait for my MRI on Monday, then here what the team has to say on Wednesday. And what they could say terrifies me.
Again today, I am frequently on the verge of tears. However, occasionally, not as often as the emergent tears, there are pockets of calm. I exhale a sort of cleansing breath, and think “just wait and see what they say. Once we know exactly what we’re dealing with, we can attack it.” I go back and forth between completely freaking out – this tumor is huge! – and saying “It is going to be okay.” From what I can feel, this tumor is bigger than any stage III tumor description I have found on line. I kept thinking last night, it must of gone farther. But last night, talking to my husband in bed, it occurred to me, my tumor is also estrogen positive – it’s fed by estrogen. Maybe that’s why it grew to large, and so quickly. It’s possible. One of the things I noticed in all of my obsessing last night – every patient is different. You can’t go by what is a “textbook case” because human beings don’t come out of a textbook. There are endless variations, surprises, and just plain old funky genetics. Just now I’m remembering something a former co-worker used to say – don’t catastrophize. She meant don’t go worrying about things that haven’t happened, and may never happen. I have to keep that in my head. I don’t know yet what exactly I have. I shouldn’t create a story around it, especially when that story is not a happy one. I’m not cut out for long-term depression. I never have been. Even when things are darkest, something in my psyche won’t allow my spirits to stay down very long. I always pop back up. Granted, the last two years have been hard, and I am not the happy-go-lucky innocent I once was. Horror has come into my life, since my dad’s murder. The kind of horror you think only happens on crime TV. But you can’t just lay down in the road and quit living, can you? Not in the middle of Hell. Who wants to stop for lunch there?
As Churchill once said, If you’re in the middle of Hell, keep going.
That’s what I have to do. Keep going.