Is it March or April that is in like a lion and out like a lamb (or is it the other way around)? Whatever...March was a fairly dry month concerning bloggable insights and so is this month quite honestly. Mainly I'm writing because I need to clean out my 'closet of insecurities' and see if I can get these negative thoughts of imminent death from pinging around in my head.
This is a yucky feeling-fear. I just don't like it. I've been floating along, carefree, in my little bubble for a couple of months without too much preoccupation about cancer. I've enjoyed my time off. But doggone it if a series of events didn't cause me to come undone this morning. First I heard about another 40ish year old woman diagnosed about 10 years ago and with kids not much older than mine with widespread metastases and approaching death. Then I gave a lecture to the medical students about being a doctor and a patient. It was a small group and the discussion, using some of my own writing from my own experiences, was insightful and thought provoking. I didn't tell the students that they were reading about me and that I had written the stuff till the end of the session and I hadn't realized how much it would affect me. It made me sad to listen to some of my own story in the words that I had written. Not so much because I had been morose when I was writing, but more because I was completely open and exposed when I was telling about my experiences. Maybe I was mourning for myself. I think that process occurs in waves, self-mourning. Sometimes the waves are so big that they come crashing right on top of you and you feel like you might get knocked over and swept away. I think right now I'm trying to do what you are supposed to do if a riptide carries you out into the ocean. I'm just floating along in the current and trying not to struggle till I gather enough strength to swim back to shore.
After these 2 things I had a conversation with my brother about the likelihood of him having to care for our mother should we play the odds and assume that I go before him and my mom. I hadn't really been thinking about checking out anytime soon (minus the two events that I just described), but we started talking about him having to care for his mother-in-law eventually and in my already depressed state I decided, 'hell, why not take this scenario one step further' and gave him my cheery prediction that he would be the sole provider for two old ladies one day. He decided to top me on my gloom and doom report and relived his experience playing bingo with and feeding ice-cream to a some middle aged woman who had suffered a traumatic brain injury and now had the mental capacity of your common garden vegetable for some church do-good event this weekend. He said it reminded him to remind our mother to figure out some retirement plan for herself so he could afford to put her in a place as nice as the one he had been to if she ever suddenly became incapacitated. I think that bummed me out even more, because in his recollection to me of his conversation to mom, I was already out of the picture. He was providing for our proposed elderly and invalid mother all on his own and I hadn't even joked to him about this yet-that he would be doing it all on his own b/c I'd be dead. He'd already thought of that. I know that all of my friends and family probably already think it. Not that they wish me dead, but they probably have scenarios in their heads that don't include me. I just don't want to hear them. I only want to hear the, "Of course you'll be at your kids' weddings!" It's not denial. I can postulate what the actuarial tables calculate just as well as the next guy, but normally I figure that it's better to have hope than not and I want people around me to feed me hope. My brother wasn't being cruel. He probably didn't even realize how it sounded (it was kind of like when my middle son drew a picture of the family right after I was diagnosed and everyone was in the picture except me. I have-joked that he had some sort of grim-reaper 6th sense).
I got so worked up that today while I was shopping at Cosco I was convinced that I was having some kind of preseizure aura and I was about to fall on the ground in convulsions at any moment with my legs splayed wide open and my skirt all askew with my soiled undies showing for the world to see. I kept waiting for an arm to twitch or a facial palsy and the resulting public humiliation of having to get dragged out of Cosco on a stretcher after causing a huge spectacle in the middle of the clothes tables. The stress of all the worry caused a sharp piercing headache in my left occiput that I was convinced was a huge tumor from whence all the neurological symptoms were originating. The fact that I could massage away the pain was only mildly reassuring.
On the way home I called my dad for reassurance and he did his best, but no one really knows how to reassure you the way you need to be reassured, so I decided that I'd just try to brush it off and suck it up. You know, repress the feelings deep down as far as they would go. It seemed to work for a little while till I remembered that my good friend who also has breast cancer and 3 small kids was probably coming out of surgery for her 2nd mastectomy with plastic surgery & reconstruction (why do we have to be in this club?). And then the icing on the shit-cake was when I read that a Sunday School friend's mom (who is in her early 60's) has just taken a turn for the worst and is going to die imminently from pancreatic cancer. This friend has 2 kids less than the age of 5 years old and a year ago thought that her mom would be around to see her grandkids grow and now she's sitting at her mother's bedside waiting for her to die. The woman who brought her into this world is about to make her final exit.
I know that I need to just focus and get my eyes back on God. But every once in a while there will be a day like today and it just gets so easy to lose sight. Huh, interesting...right after I wrote that last sentence I read from Sarah Young's book, Jesus Calling this passage, "When you focus on what you don't have or on situations that displease you, your mind also becomes darkened. You take for granted life, salvation, sunshine, flowers and countless other gifts from [God]. You look for what is wrong and refuse to enjoy life until that is 'fixed'"
So I will do my best to give thanks even on days like today.
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