Not My First Rodeo
Thoughts on getting breast cancer again
Getting a second cancer diagnosis hits differently. It’s no longer a fluke, like I had hoped. It now has staying power, or at least rebound power.
Autocorrect always wants to change “cancer” to “center”, and that’s ironic because I don’t feel centered. I feel off-kilter, kind of like when I experienced a partial eclipse in 2017 and the altered sunlight was eerie. Familiar, but wrong. That’s my life now.
Paradox is not only my savior, but also my cross to bear, which is, of course, its own paradox. Here are some cancer paradoxes I’ve been thinking about:
Yes, you could call cancer a “journey” and it has taught me things. Also yes, cancer is merely a result of antagonistic pleiotropy (as long as genes code for high fertility, it doesn’t matter what else those genes cause later in life), and it isn’t here to teach me anything at all.
I don’t think heaven exists, but I also hope I’m wrong.
I appreciate my husband’s relentless optimism that I’m going to beat this, while also wishing he’d just let me complain without needing to fix it.
I will feel cheated if I don’t make the 81 years my mom made, while also realizing that the universe owes me nothing at all.
I’m so grateful my kids are adults and I don’t have to worry about leaving little ones, while also desperately wishing for more decades with them.
I appreciate my doctors’ expertise. I also want to make my own decisions about my body, which doesn’t always make those doctors happy.
Life is so unfair and beautiful and messed up and delicious and tragic and delightful and heartbreaking, all at once and all at the same time.
My good friend said she doesn’t really trust anyone who hasn’t gone through hard times. I feel that.
Sometimes the bruises make the best art.
Sometimes the battering is what it takes to come out with a soft heart.
Sometimes all we can do in the hurricane of life is reach out and hold a hand.
Sometimes those hands are right next to us. Sometimes they’re across the internet.
Sometimes those hands are paws on a dog, instead.
Sometimes we have to hold our own hands.
Sometimes in reaching to heal another’s pain, we find our own balm.
Cancer is a beast and not a teacher.
Maybe I can learn the lessons, anyway.
Although “rodeo” is in your DNA, cancer is a Beast. Period. But I love your kaleidoscopic lens, and how you view and write about it. That is Beauty.
Stay strong and resolute. Many do beat metastasis. There is no reason why you cannot be one of them! I also had the bad luck 1x and fight to prevent a 2nd go around. Oncologists have come out with
?DNA blood tests for your point in time. “Cure” magazine just covered it. ‘Hoping for the best and to one day read “you climbed the mountain” again and are smiling!