Nine months later, and my hair is still so sparse. It's thicker, to be sure, because people are commenting optimistically in careful tones about how great it looks. Talking to me like I'm a sick person, because I am. I was...I am still at risk, still vulnerable...still recently 'recovered'.
I am still processing the feelings of this all...how to feel, who to be. What does it mean to be a cancer survivor? It sounds so cliche, so much like someone else, like not me, but it also is me, definitionally. I am a person who has survived cancer, I am a cancer survivor. So now I have to figure out what that means to me, for me.
Which is not to say that cancer or recovery define me, but I am undeniably changed. I supposed that's the weird, back-handed gift of my short hair; every morning I wake up to a reminder that I am never going to be the person I was before February 2022, before that first physical, that first imaging appointment. Before I felt that little lump start to grow in my neck and then, later, saw the bugling image of my cancer straining against the barrier of my collar bone, struggling to grow beyond the confines of my body, my neck, my spleen, by shrunken stomach and infected heart.
It makes sense, something like that, seeing an invader lit up in bright yellow inside the deepest parts of your own body, entwined with your lymphatic system, impossible to cut out. Something like that should change you. No one should be able to stay the same after that.
And after everything that came after that. The many tiny losses. The total physical change that slowly overtook my body as I gripped my past life, my 'normal' life with white-knuckled fists.
I comfort myself with all the things I managed to keep, all of the normal I managed to preserve and insert in that time. Rather than focus on the loss. The times I told my son I couldn't because I was too tired. The times I felt myself start to faint. The time I fainted, and lost a bit of time between when I was standing, focused and alert, and when I was on the ground, the man I love standing over me looking as scared as I have ever seen him, me not understandinghow I got down there in the first place.
The times I would enter the hospital to undress, don those paper gowns and be scanned, imaged, cut open and sewed back up, explored and biopsied.
The many, many, many ways I lost control over my own body. Or, really, gave away control. But is it giving away if it is under threat? If you don't do this you might die, that was the constant fear. And I am nothing if not obedient in the face of authority and death.
So now, here I am. Trying to keep up the same face, the same facade. But now the fear and adrenaline and fight are all gone, because I've won the fight.
And I am just left here with my body, altered forever but technically health. My mind, also altered forever but reeling from everything that has transpired. My thoughts, also reeling, flying from memory to invasive thought to missed deadline to next task, as if getting back to normal is the new goal. As if getting back to normal is a weighty enough goal to replace my former goal; beat cancer with a smile.
How can anything fill the hole in my to-do list that Beat Cancer With a Smile left?
