From the Inside Out

All is quiet on the cancer front. If I were to stay totally in the moment, I would say that I'm overcome with happiness to be here, in front of my computer, taking a break from doing projects around the house, rather than recovering from surgery in the hospital. But staying in the moment is futile, counterproductive, even. Conditions like this require planning, both for the short-term (How will my daughter get home from school when I'm in the hospital?), intermediate-term (Who will cover my classes for me when I'm gone?) and long-term (Should I consider putting more money into life insurance?).

My daughter doesn't have school today, and since I was supposed to be in the hospital, she was supposed to have a play date at her friend's house. However, since I'm not in the hospital, and I figure my daughter will probably be over at her friend's house a lot in the upcoming weeks, I offered to have her friend over here instead. I love this friend; she is the only nine-year-old girl I know who might actually be just as weird as my daughter. She's the only girl I know who responds to my daughter's bizarre and out-of-blue comments by laughing and declaring, 'Ellie! You are my favorite friend!'

I just had a rather endearing conversation said friend. I had just cooked the girls pasta for lunch, and while they were eating, I was doing a meatball-cooking marathon, because there is nothing I love more than coming home from a long day at work, having no idea what to make for dinner, and discovering a bag of frozen meatballs in the freezer. Plus, I was cleaning out the refrigerator and found a pound of sausage and a pound of on-the-bubble ground beef that needed something to happen to it ASAP. My daughter had left the kitchen for some reason, so it was just me and Friend. Exercising proper etiquette, Friend tried to make conversation with me about my cancer.

Friend: So... it looks like you're doing a lot better than...
Me (thinking): Oh I can't wait to hear what follows this.
Friend: ... than... before.

It came out awkwardly, but somehow, probably because I know a few things about nine-year-olds, I know what she was trying to say. You look a lot better than I expected. As in, Wow, you don't look gravely ill. You don't look like you might be dying. She was trying to reconcile this woman who just cooked her lunch and was making meatballs and looks perfectly normal with the woman everyone has been talking about in serious, hushed, tones: OMG did you hear Ellie's mom has cancer?

And it struck me what an odd disease this is. Because you can look and even feel completely normal, despite having this potentially deadly condition. And not only that, you can look normal and sometimes even feel fairly normal up until pretty close to your death. This disease, it gets you from the inside out. Of course, there are others that do the same, but it's hard to think of many that can leave so few traces on the outside that something is going terribly wrong inside. Even the hair loss everyone associates with cancer isn't from the cancer itself.

Right now, I look and feel great, especially now that I've been able to sleep again. On any given day, I feel far more like a woman who desperately needs hip surgery than a woman who needs a mastectomy, oophorectomy, and possibly hysterectomy. Aside from the lump in my breast, cancer has given me no concrete symptoms. And even if it metastasizes, it will likely be caught by a scan before it causes me any health problems. It doesn't usually end well for people who don't discover cancer until after it starts to give them problems. How many of us have heard a story about someone who went to the doctor because of abdominal pain and died less than a year later from some sort of cancer that had been eating away at their insides?

It is confusing. It is confusing even for adults, so many of whom tell me that I look great and they cannot believe I have cancer. Why shouldn't I look great? As someone on another blog said, I don't have cancer of the face. LOL. And while I'm glad to look great, sometimes it is difficult to look and feel so normal. Hell, I could making all of this up! Or maybe there was a terrible mistake on my test results and I don't even have cancer. I don't feel ill. I don't feel like I might be dying. The treatments are worse than the cancer itself.

All these thoughts, they ran through my head in a brief instant after my daughter's friend valiantly tried to make conversation with me and I tried to think of an appropriate response. So I offered: 'I feel much better now than I did after my surgeries over the summer.' Then I added, 'But I'm getting ready to have more surgeries.' She looked at me for a moment, then said, 'Are you nervous? If it were me, I'd be SO SCARED!' I thought for a second, then admitted to her that I'm scared. I'm not scared about the surgeries so much as I am about the future. But I wouldn't expect a nine-year-old to understand why all of this makes me scared for the future, nor do I even want her to. In fact, I've spent a lot of time trying to cover up the fear, to protect my kids from it, perhaps too much. All they know is that I yell a lot these days, which in a child's mind means I might not love them anymore. But being scared about surgery is something a child can understand, and perhaps a good compromise for conversations with my kids. A child can understand Mommy is nervous about surgery, but not Mommy is nervous the surgery won't take care of her problem, that it won't be enough.

No one has asked me if I'm scared before, at least not in such a forward and point-blank manner, until today. Perhaps with adults, it's a given, something that doesn't need to be stated up front. There is so much of this to be afraid of. We all understand this fear on different levels. Even adults can grasp certain aspects of this better than others. I may look and feel great, but inside, there is fear. So much fear, it scares me.