I’m Fine—Truly.

(Please note: This post is longer than is customary for a blog. Others will not be.)

I guess I expected nothing, really, to change. I figured I’d feel sort of sickish for awhile, and then it’d be over, and all would be normal again. But my experience has been different in some ways from my expectations.

In the wake of my cancer diagnosis, I didn’t feel much different—little real surprise, little particular fear, little shift in my sense of myself or in my attitude. I haven’t felt much of those things since the beginning of this whole episode—a twinge here and there, but nothing really unnerving. I don’t know if I was/am in denial, or if I’m really just that sanguine. My biggest worry was that if I died, my husband Dyke would miss me. I thought—and said as much—that as the person with cancer, I had the easier situation, that if Dyke had the disease instead of me, I’d find it harder to deal with. I still think that’s true. My second biggest worry was of what the treatment itself would be like. But I figured, whatever its unpleasantness, I’d get through it. (And I did.)

So I didn’t expect much to change. I’d feel bad for awhile and then I’d feel better. Or if I did die, I’d go through the process, get to the end, and leap into the nothingness that I believe awaits me—the getting there would be the harder part. But either way, I expected that the me I’ve known over the past years would stay more or less the same, just with this new situation to deal with and get beyond, one way or the other.

I hadn’t given much thought to how much me has changed throughout my life. I’ve not been the same from one year to the next, one month, one day, one hour to the next. The changes are generally small enough and slow enough to go unnoticed, but the shifts still take place. Over the past year, the changes have been just as invisible but more dramatic. Because I assumed they were all temporary—and I’m still hoping that most of them are—I didn’t worry too much about them; I simply tried to deal with whatever condition I found myself in.

Nearly every moment I was preoccupied by physical challenges. First the odd experience of the biopsy, under a drug that altered my consciousness, lessened pain and its importance, but didn’t really knock me out. I was fully aware of the doctor repeatedly plunging some instrument into my side, panting with the effort. There was nothing gentle about it, for either of us. Then open abdominal surgery that I was entirely out for, followed by a week of pain and debility in the hospital, and then the challenge of trying to regain ground over the weeks following my release. Then six months of chemo—the nausea and fatigue; the swing between diarrhea and constipation; the alternation of lack of appetite with ravenous hunger; the ever-increasing neuropathy in burning, peeling feet and fingers; the difficulty maintaining my balance; my itchy, thickening skin blooming bright red spots in new locations every day. Trying to determine whether my hair was thinning, or if it had already been that thin before chemo and I just hadn’t known it. I was distracted too by the cyclical nature of chemotherapy itself, dreading infusions and their intense immediate aftereffects the first week, looking forward to the diminishment of those effects over the second week, and the freedom from chemo drugs the third week, before the cycle began again. Every cycle intensified the reactions until all three weeks were almost equally miserable. There was the wild period where an antiemetic resulted in my inability to walk without running into walls, along with the experience of dementia—for example, the maddening and frightening difficulty of trying to figure out how to put on my bathrobe and not succeeding. The following cycle I took a different antiemetic, which caused escalating vertigo that, after a few days, led to a dead faint. By the last cycle, I was so fatigued by the immense effort of showering that it required all my strength and determination to make my way to bed, a journey of some 20 feet, before collapsing into it.

And finally the end of treatment, the joyous prospect of “getting back to normal.” Two days later, I fell in the shower, breaking my arm and two vertebrae in my lower back. In the wake of the fall, the utterly novel experience of complete helplessness—two hours struggling to crawl from the shower to the foot of our bed, which I was then unable to hoist myself onto. (I no longer find anything remotely funny in the line Help—I’ve fallen and I can’t get up). The following weeks of total dependency in which I relied completely on Dyke, who helped me with everything from getting to the bathroom to repositioning me in bed. Several weeks later, while Dyke was at work, in a moment of urgent need I tried to get to the bathroom unassisted. I collapsed with the first step, this time breaking a rib. That second fall clipped my wings; thereafter I respected my limitations and was exquisitely careful to avoid pushing beyond them. For weeks I was petrified of taking a shower alone, without Dyke’s help and supervision.

Even now, just shy of eight months after I fell in the shower, I’m still dealing with the aftermath of both chemo and my now-healed bones, which are still painful with certain movements. The entire last year, just making it through each day consumed my attention as much as my energy. But now that the side effects have subsided (I still have some neuropathy and occasional fatigue, but nothing like before), I’ve viscerally realized that my brain is a physical part of my body. It too was assailed by the chemo and various stresses, and has suffered its own raft of side effects. I have had difficulty focusing for more than ten or so minutes at a time (or sometimes even for a moment), my memory is poorer, and I’ve noticed that my ability to connect dots is sometimes spotty. I’m doing crossword puzzles and word games like crazy, hoping to revitalize and reestablish some of the neural pathways that seem to have been closed due to repairs. I want them to open again, but I’m not confident they all will.

The oddest thing, perhaps, about this entire experience is that it hasn’t escalated my fear of death. If anything, I’ve been less afraid of mortality than I was just a few years ago. I can’t fathom why, but I’m grateful for it.

Dyke thinks it’s because throughout this period I never really believed my death was immanent—and it’s true that I didn’t. Even the night I received my diagnosis, and in subsequent days when my situation more fully sank in, I didn’t believe I would die from that cancer, although I knew it was possible. I still do. And I’m still not as troubled by the prospect as it seems I should be—as I’ve read that most people in a similar situation are. My biggest worry about death at this point remains that Dyke would have to recreate a new life without me. I know how hard that would be, and I’d like to spare him that experience. (Were the roles reversed, it would be just as hard for me. And sooner or later, it will be, for one of us.)

Maybe I’m less concerned about death than I used to be—and I did go through a period of nearly obsessive worry about mortality in my late 50s and early 60s—because I’m so happy with my life. I never expected to be this content, this loved, this loving. My experience with cancer and utter debility demonstrated the intensity of my husband’s love, and the concerned support of my community. So maybe death feels less threatening because every day seems like a gift—not one I’m entitled to, but one that I’m grateful for. And when I don’t get more of them (and I know that someday I won’t), it won’t be a tragedy. The tragedy would have been never reaching this place of contentment and satisfaction. Many people, I think, don’t ever get here.

So that, I guess, is the biggest change that cancer has brought to me: a vivid awareness that every day I’m here, no matter when my life ends, I’m extraordinarily lucky.