Cancer is a Lifestyle

I read somewhere that cancer doesn’t end when the chemo sessions end.  Cancer is the new lifestyle!

I find my quiet times are haunting me with my thinky thing running off in the directions of  “What If” or “When”.   It feels that everything I do is tainted with the fear of when or if this horror will be back.  Then the natural progression takes me back to sitting in the oncologist’s office when he told me that once its back there will be nothing they can do to help me.

It seems that everyone around me is elated that this journey is over and that we should be getting back to normal now.  But what is normal now? Will anything ever be normal again?  How much do I change my life now because in 2 or 5 years I may not be here? Or again I might be here, fit and well.   I tell myself that I could cross the road tomorrow and be killed, but that unexpected death does not fill me with this dread of waiting for the cancer to come back.  It makes me feel as if I have my head on the guillotine and I am waiting for it to either fall or Robin Hood to ride in and save me.

I use to be so sure of who I was, but I’m not that person anymore and I don’t know how to get back to being her.

I have a couple of friends made during this journey, one a gorgeous woman who sat beside me during Chemo who laughed with me, has made me cry, has given me support and I hope that I have supported her.  At times they have listened when no one else seems to understand.  The other is on the other side of the world who I have never actually met, but who I came to know through a Facebook Group, whose simple dignity and grace shone through her messages.  Both these women are travelling this path but both have diagnoses that are not as good as mine.  One who messaged me this week to say she is nearing the end of her journey and I will probably not hear from her again, the other also receiving bad news, but still fighting hard.

My question is simply why.  What did we do wrong to deserve this horror.  Why us?