A Year of NED
Nothing has ever been certain
I just passed a kind of milestone. The one-year check-up with the gyn, the oncologist and my GP. Good blood tests, no suspicious shadows in the mammogram.
No Evidence of Disease.
There is a part of me that has a difficult time emotionally accepting that nothing has changed really. No year before cancer ever held a promise that I wouldn’t get cancer. And I have never understood the value of statistics. It seems to me that everything is—in experience—an outcome of yes or no, regardless. Yes. Or No.
Still, I imagine each year’s mammogram now, passing by—through—like the torii gates at the Fushimi Inari shrine. If you have never been, don’t go in the summer. On second thought: do. The heat will press your body towards the earth while you try to climb the stairs. You will feel alive in a way that we don’t usually talk about.
Passing each gate will be like listening to the world’s ticking clock. Or it was for me. My two sons, with their disparate energies, ageing bit by bit in my mind’s eye as I watched them walk ahead of me. 15. 16. 17. 18…
Why is it that the ancient sacred half-understood artefacts that belong to other cultures makes us so much more aware of mortality? “This is what they believe in regard to death…”
Is it by chance or by nature that my mind wanders from the other to myself in these situations? Or do you feel it, too? The strange resonance from foreign music that sets you apart from the world, and forces you to realise that you are not integral to it?
Or maybe it was the climb, and the conspicuousness of my breath? That was years ago. Another life. We are our own ancestors sometimes. We take what wisdom we can and accept that most of what we see will forever be a mystery.
And we grieve, sometimes for what was and is gone, and sometimes for what never was and—now—can never be.
How many gates will we pass through, and who will we be when we do?
I had a day off work today and spent the time in my little library, writing. My fingers press the keys, and they snap lightly up again. Snap, snap—keeping time, like the mechanisms of a clock.
How long do I have to say what I want to say? How much breath is left in me?
I cried when I got the news that there is no evidence of disease. Relief, not joy.
Exhaling, letting my body go soft and heavy. So heavy, I can imagine I really am integral to the matrix of the Earth itself.
Cross post from Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen:
[…]
It has been a year since the tumors were taken out of my body. There is no mechanism for the surgeons to double-check their work: they sew you up and send you home. A year later, they do another mammogram to see if something has come back.
While the technician is positioning the huge machine (by pressing the switch with her foot, causing the two planes to move toward each other, while she squeezes what is left of my left breast into place, pushing my shoulder out of the way), she glances at my face.
“Are you all right?”
I have no cognitive awareness that my vision has been closing in, and that I’m about to collapse. My body is aware of and responding in a way that has bypassed my brain: no thoughts, no beliefs… and in fact, no feelings.
Once I understand what is going on, I laugh out loud. I have a macabre cartoon image in my head of the majority of my body lying on the floor bleeding, having fallen away from the part of me squeezed tightly between the two planes of the machine. I can’t draw, and I can’t explain it, so it stays my own private joke.
Now there is a third woman in the room, who stands behind me, her feet wide, braced to hold me up while the machine does its job. I stare at the Joan Miro graphic hanging in a cheap frame on the opposite wall. Wobbly tear-drop shapes that look like flattened, distorted breasts. It’s funny/not funny.
I know that, no matter how many sessions I use to talk about this with my psychiatrist, this will happen again in one form or another. My body is a lovely beast. I’ve lived with her long enough to know that I’ll only—maybe—be able to “justify” her responses, to mechanically graft a logical framework onto what already exists.
And regardless, I’ll never be able to control her. I said I believe in the subconscious, but I believe that the term is a misnomer. It isn’t a sub-function of consciousness, but a concurrent awareness wholly unto itself.
It is what it is.
And if I can love my weirdo dog Leonard without understanding him, surely I can accept this her/me thing that isn’t reliant on an if/then thought process. Maybe I will do better to hold her, live with her, and stop trying to fix her. To fix me.
Hell: Faint if you want to faint, Baby.
[…]
Warmly,
Ren