Ep.12: Chemo-fear
It’s been sitting in the background for weeks, a soft drone or buzz, like tinnitus but now it’s getting louder and its starting to provide the soundtrack to each day – chemo. On Thursday at 1045 I will find out whether the lymph nodes they removed from my armpit contain cancer and if they do I will need chemotherapy. And if I need chemotherapy then the road I’m on to recovery just got a whole lot longer and bumpier. If I need chemotherapy it’ll be months not weeks til I’ve beaten this and months not week until I start to see me again through the noise of battle.
Chemo. Just writing the word forces bile up my throat. I’m trying to work out why I feel so rooted to the spot with fear about it, I don’t know but I am. David says it won’t have spread and I will be fine but that’s David’s mantra not mine. My way of operating is evidence based so until I have evidence to prove my cancer has either spread or not spread my jury is out. So I perch, here, teetering between ok and very much not ok as we eek our way forwards towards Thursday and the results. I fill my days with sorting the house for the move 2.5 weeks after my mastectomy, floating through my long list of tasks while the chemo drone keeps up its constant hum. Friends who’ve been through chemo try to reassure me, ‘it’s not so bad as you’d think’. I pluck up courage to ask my good friend Jane who’s crawling through her own chemo hell just now whether she’s lost her beautiful hair. She hasn’t she tells me, but she did buy a wig in case and she sends me a photo and I think she looks beautiful in her wig but tired and scared. I try to imagine losing my hair. I have a lot of hair, it’s one of the things people notice most about me, but going there in my mind makes me wince and start to cry. I tell myself I’ll buy crazy coloured wigs and just have fun with it all but I know I’m kidding myself. I have visions of myself battered and bruised and maimed from the mastectomy then slowly going bald. I wonder how on earth David and I will be able to cling to the physical side of our relationship without being capsized by the monster I’ll become. Maybe David’s approach is better than mine. Maybe telling myself I’ll be fine on Thursday is easier than walking this tightrope of fear and hope but the prospect of being wrong footed is so hard the bear I don’t dare to believe I’ll be in the clear.