See previous post first or read series from the beginning. All posts link to each other.
August 1, nearly a month after my first visit to the physician for what was simply an annoying cough.
Usually test results showed up on my healthcare portal before I got a phone call or news at a follow-up doctor visit, so I was refreshing the website every ten minutes in anticipation of my biopsy results.
Which scared the shit out of me when I got a phone call from the pulmonologist before the results posted. There's no way this is a good sign.
"We got the biopsy results and it indicates cancer. A stage 4 sarcoma of the lungs, most likely originating in the uterus based on the tissue sample."
Stage 4.
Sarcoma. I didn't know what that was but anything following "stage 4" had to be shit, right?
She then said a lot of medical stuff that I can't recall because all I could hear was a ringing in my ears. Lung cancer. Lung cancer. Lung cancer.
I DON'T EVEN FUCKING SMOKE.
The doctor said they'd follow up with a PET scan in a couple days to get a more comprehensive look at the cancer and to confirm it originated in the uterus.
Cancer.
The big C-word. I miss the days when the C-word referred to cunt, not cancer. Cunt I can deal with--being called one, having one, bleeding profusely from one, but cancer? Not so much. This is all new to me.
Sure I have relatives who have been diagnosed with cancer but they all became cancer survivors whereas I'm more likely to be called stage 5 cancer because the PET scan would reveal I have stage 4 sarcoma in FIVE DIFFERENT PLACES: the uterus, lungs, pancreas, liver, and bone. I didn't even know that was possible. I'm basically cancer with legs and a bobblehead. And oh, by the way, the left leg has cancer in it too, just for shits and giggles.
I didn't know things like this existed. This is the sort of so-shitty-how-can-it-be-real thing that is a one in a million thing that makes the newspaper because it's so outlandishly fucked up.
And it's happening to me. My name is Megan, and I have stage 5 cancer. Every day now I wake up and this is really my life. It's not some incredibly shitty nightmare that I get to wake up from and shake off in my morning shower.
Yet I still wake up each day hoping for the same boring life I had only two months ago, because maybe this time I'll wake up to my old life.
Maybe.
Everything I typed, twice, was shit.
ReplyDeleteSo, let's just say I hope you reach remission soon.
My late father, who was a doctor, was full of aphorisms. Two he used to say were, "There are no one-way tickets," and "Sooner or later we all get fitted for the pine overcoat." Which is to say, every person living is going to die. We put it out of our minds and pretend it isn't going to happen. Unfortunately, you have to face that it might happen soon, sooner than it should, and for that I am sorry.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you ever read "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles, but it has this great passage:
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Maybe your brother could make you a full moon calendar, so you will always know what nights to go out and watch the full moon rise.
You are so strong to write about this! -jll
ReplyDeleteI've been reading your blog and twitter feed for years. Just hang in there !!! P.S. Thanks for sharing your first name Megan.
ReplyDelete