Love and Cancer

I haven’t written in months, because I don’t even know what to say. So much has happened, yet nothing at all.

It’s been eight months since my breakup, seven months since we have spoken a single word, eight months since he started a new relationship, and I struggle daily with the cognitive dissonance. He is simultaneously the greatest love I have ever known and the purest evil I could ever imagine. I can’t believe I still miss him. I would never take him back; I know he is rotten to the core, but those good memories persist. The future I imagined, the future he imagined with me, still looms over me. Heavily. It’s been long enough that I can barely remember being with him, but those feelings of love and hope won’t fade. I hate myself for feeling like this, and I hate him even more for making me. I still find myself asking why he would do this. I still find myself believing his love was real. I still feel pain when I think of how quickly he moved on (realistically, I know he was cheating before broke up). It kills me that my replacement has now been with him almost as long as I was. It kills me that I can’t put myself back out there. It kills me to know I probably never even cross his mind, when he has so religiously crossed my mind over the last eight months. I’ve read and listened to the book Psychopath Free six times recently. It’s the only thing that brings me comfort, because the descriptions validate me. My ex made it so I don’t trust my own mind or memory, and so I cling to the things that make me feel validated.

I wasn’t planning to date at all during my cancer treatment, but I felt amazing after my lumpectomy and went on a few dates. No one special, but I felt happy to be back out there. But my reconstruction surgery was much more difficult to recover from than anticipated, so I put it on hold. And that time bled right into chemo. I went on a couple dates during chemo, but pretty quickly, I realized the exhaustion and chemo brain weren’t compatible with continuing. There were a few days in there where I felt like I couldn’t even form sentences. But the nail in the coffin was when I started losing my hair. I made it through about five rounds of chemo with no hair loss, and I was starting to feel cautiously optimistic that the cold capping was working better than hoped for (their calculator gave me an 80% chance of keeping 50% of my hair). But then in week six, the shedding started. My part instantly widened, and a few, admittedly tiny, bald spots popped up. I didn’t know how long it would go on for or how bad it would get. I stopped doing anything with my hair other than combing it once a day. I looked terrible; I felt terrible. Truly, losing my hair was on par with finding out I had cancer in the first place. So I spent several weeks in bed feeling sorry for myself. The shedding seems to have stopped now, and I’d say I lost somewhere between 5-10% of my hair. My parts are wide, and there is thinning all over, but truly, if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t notice. I still do have three more round of chemo to go.

And chemo? I would not recommend icing your head, hands and feet while mainlining poison and simultaneously vomiting. 0/10. Hope to never do it again. I am happy to report the end is in sight. I had a horrific experience during my second round where I needed to go to the bathroom, and they were trying to get me ready to go, but the chair I was in got stuck, they were pushing and pulling things for literally ten minutes, I desperately needed to use the bathroom at that point, I was so afraid my IV was going to get ripped out, and then I heard some loud plastic snap. I screamed. No less than ten people ran in. They got me out of the chair, and I went to the bathroom and just cried, not knowing how on earth I was supposed to do this ten more times. But I have done it seven more times. Still dreading the last three, though.

Then I have about a month off, then I go into fifteen rounds of radiation. And then seven more months of Herceptin. And then I will hopefully spend the rest of my life cancer-free. Surgery and chemo were my biggest fears, and so I am happy those chapters will both be closed soon.

But wait, there’s even more cancer. Not in me. Well I actually don’t know that to be true, technically. But my uncle, my late mother’s brother, has been battling cancer for about a year and a half. Head and Neck. It has an 80% survival rate. My uncle did two miserable rounds of chemo and 30 rounds of radiation. But, his partner called me about two weeks ago to tell me the cancer had spread, and my uncle had one to three months to live, but if he got radiation on his brain tumors, they could maybe stretch it out to five or six months. I knew his prognosis was not great after the cancer metastasized, but I was thinking years, not months. And the worst part to me is that he went through such miserable treatment for it not to have mattered in the end. I’m trying to talk to and see him as much as possible, and oddly fortunately, my own cancer has led to enough flexibility to see him often. This man is the closest family member I have, and really the only person who gives me a feeling of family. Losing him is devastating. And also definitely makes me question my own ability to survive an imminently survivable cancer…

I hate my ex for many reasons, but not the least of which is that last summer, as my uncle was in chemo, we went to visit him. Now I was visiting my uncle every other weekend at this point, but he had never come with me. My uncle wanted to meet him. And I told my ex that given my uncle’s condition, I really did not want to have them meet if this wasn’t going to be a forever relationship. We had firmly established by that point that it was, but it was important for me to reiterate that. And so we went. And had a great time. I got stuck doing some work, but I could barely contain the joy I felt as I sat at the dining room table, looking out to the patio to see my ex and my uncle in deep conversation. So often during that relationship I would just stop to think to myself how happy and lucky I felt. And it is just so hard to reconcile that barely four months later, he had a new girlfriend.