Very REAL talk...

The last month was rough, damn, that was.  Harder than the few minutes  over the phone when the cancer diagnosis was relayed to me on the day of March 20th, tougher than the month and a half between that and  the day of the mastectomy on May 12th.  Those in-between days, when I marched through, planned and arranged my appointments and consults, tests and checkups, attended to paperwork leading up to the day when a part of your body that had always been front and present will be removed, taken away, literally cut out. 

Life did not stop at the news of a life-threatening illness. It did not slow down one bit.  Life shifted and sped up like a bullet train that had one purpose, get to the destination. I thought my feet were solidly, fully and swaggerfully planted as I marched through, sashayed, as I needed to be ramping up till the day of.

It was a month and a half between diagnosis and mastectomy. I would be the first one to say that I attended to this cancer like a project I was handed and systematically processed. Sure, there were some bumps and glitches as I executed, but just like everything else, I shifted, pivoted, adjusted my moves and made up a new routine on the fly as needed. 

A month has passed.  Sorry, not sorry but I will say it - it was shit.

The good days now happen more and last longer than the not so good days. My meds are lower and lesser.  Sleep is not so broken up and since my dose of Valium at bedtime is lower, I wake up with my head less foggy in the morning. I can now reach for the face wash that was a tad too high on the shelf, and able to heat up my own meal.  The nerve pains (that I, by the way, had no clue what were and why) feel less like fresh raw scrapes or rug burn (but I keep the meds close by just in case).  My chest area doesn't feel like there is a mutant or alien growing in size and want to rip through and out of my flesh.  Oh, and the chest, I don't avert my eyes from it anymore; frankenstein-looking and all, that's all part of me.

I am still mostly having cat days but the dog "hours"  come more and more often. More importantly, I am now able to welcome the need to return to the window sill when the cat needs to sit and ignore the "humans". I did 3 loads of laundry, gently and slowly, and the cat told the dog  that she was being stupid and to sit her ass down asap.

I still have "triggers" emotionally.  Someone said to me that my "window sill" looked like a perfect vacation set up (ahm...no honey, my vacations involve cocktails and cabanas, not stool softeners and pain killers).   This cat's claws almost, almost came out, but fortunately, I don't and haven't had the strength for sharpening them so I quietly stewed over that comment).  Emotions, oh so many.  I cried over some photos from Facebook Memories - when I had two beautiful daughters in matching pineapple bikinis from a summer trip to South Beach when I turned 50 almost a decade ago.

Learning sooooo much about random things, some heavy and some amusing about us humans. The variety of comfort and discomfort in how we respond, in how I receive, just how completely unknown we can all be to ourselves sometimes.  What a month - what a couple of years actually!  But man, what an absolute privilege to have this time of graceful and grateful acceptances and offerings that I would not have been able to observe and breathe in had I not been brought to a place, a state and time so foreign: the cat on the warm window sill.

(An entry from https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/rowehoffer where I update. I am unable to reply, write to many one at a time, hence the caringbridge site.)