Life is full of decisions. Black shirt or red? This job or that? Eat dessert or not? I’m used to making decisions. I even think I’m pretty good at it.
Cancer was full of decisions too. I read, I consulted, I cried, I researched, and I made every one. And I was confident in every one. But it’s not over. It will never be over.
Because I am cancer’s bitch now. Every day, every minute, every second of my life, I live with the spectre of cancer looming over me. I thought, so naively, that I would get through cancer. That I would move past cancer. But you never do, because you’re never really “cured.” You’re just waiting.
For two years, I have struggled with menopause brought on by chemotherapy. Let me list, just for posterity (a word I just couldn’t remember and had to google because, you know – menopause), some of the symptoms:
- hot flashes
- night sweats
- disorganized thinking
- forgetfulness
- decreased libido
- dry eyes
- dry vagina
- neck cramps
- irritability
- depression
- wrinkles
- thinning hair
- thinning skin
That’s just off the top of my head. My body aged 10 years in three months and this shit came on overnight like a bucket of cold water over the head. But cold water, what a relief that would actually be! I slept through the night last week – something I haven’t done since December, because every single night I wake up numerous times, drenched in sweat, feeling like a fire is burning inside my body. I finally made an appointment with a psychotherapist two weeks ago, one recommended by the survivor outreach nurse at Swedish, because for the first time in years I felt suicidal. I feel trapped inside my own body and the ONLY way out of that would be to ESCAPE THIS BODY.
But that’s not what I want either. In the past, my suicidal thoughts have been linked to brain chemistry, to feeling worthless, useless, a burden. I know I have important jobs now – I’m a mother to two amazing children, I’m a friend, I’m a wife, I’m a sister. I want to watch my children grow up, I want to grow old with my husband, I want to change the world by filling it with kindness every day. So it’s not chemical – it’s situational. And most situations, you can rely on them ending, eventually. But what when the situation is a body that has been fucked up? What when it could be a year or a decade or even longer? What when there is no end in sight and you’re trapped day in and day out in a body that is betraying you? And could ultimately betray you to death?
So I decided to take control. I went to my gyno Tuesday and I laid out my situation and she put me on an estradiol patch and progesterone pills. And suddenly I felt liberated. It’s too soon to know if it’s working – the hot flashes continue, and it could take up to three weeks to know – but I had hope. Hope that things would get better. And more than that, agency – over my own body, over my life, over what cancer took from me.
We talked about it, of course, and I already knew – hormones are verboten for those of us with ER+ PR+ cancer. In fact, if you have been following my blog, you may remember that the actual full treatment for hormone+ cancer includes a drug called Tamoxifen that actually blocks naturally occurring estrogen and progesterone and sends the patient into menopause. I opted out of Tamoxifen, but it turns out I didn’t need it – my body went into menopause on its own. So in brief, hormones bad, make Kate’s cancer grow. But lack of hormones also bad, make Kate want to die.
Where the hell does this leave me? Fucked.
After floating for the last two days, I just got a voicemail from my gyno. She spoke with my onc, with whom I have an appointment tomorrow. He is not happy. She reiterated several times that he understood why I had chosen to go on hormones, but that he was not in support of it because naturally they have no data on what it does to survival rates. But since we know that blocking hormones increases survival rates, I think we can safely guess what increasing hormones does. Or can we? I mean, who the hell really knows?
So tomorrow I go meet with my onc, who you may remember I absolutely adore. I trust and respect him beyond words, so I already know this is going to be a tough appointment. And I don’t even know what to do at this point. I feel like whatever decision I make, I lose. I literally have to choose my mental health and physical comfort OR potentially dying of cancer.
And if it were just me, if I was a single, childless woman, I know what I would choose. I’d do the hormones and just live until I died. So maybe that’s my answer. But it’s just not as simple as that.
So here I am, wedged between a rock and the hardest of places. And standing here, I raise my middle fingers to the sky and say, FUCK YOU CANCER. FUCK. YOU.
complikated 