My husband and I have the most hideous reclining love seat you've ever seen. It's the type of furniture you'd expect to find in your grandparents' basement, something you can't even give away for free. It's big and clunky and poorly made, and as my husband explained to Dr. T, It's a color not found in nature. I am not sure what I was thinking when I agreed to buy it, other than I was tired of looking at recliners and love seats and just wanted to be done. I've got even less tolerance for shopping than stress.
However, this reclining love seat and I have come to be good friends. I spent a good deal of time on it after hip surgery and while dealing with DVT, and I slept on it after my mastectomy and for nearly a month after my reconstruction. It has seen me through some difficult times. If I were sentimental, I would never get rid of it. Fortunately, I'm not.
I wrote that when I saw Dr. T two weeks ago, I was sick. It started off as just laryngitis with a bit of cold-like stuff thrown in, then progressed into a wretched case of sinusitis and bronchitis, with what my husband refers to as 'a marriage-ending cough.' I'm still not 100% right now; I'd put myself right around 80%, which is a lot better than last week, when I was gasping for air, lying down and sleeping any chance that I got, and was convinced that this was the end for me. I figured the cancer had metastasized into my lungs, and that was what it felt like to die. Fortunately, I was wrong.
I don't know whether to be angry at my immune system for failing me, or to feel sorry for it for being so overworked. Either way, I spent most of last week sleeping (or really, trying to sleep, and not actually sleeping) downstairs on my trusty friend, The Hideous Love Seat, because my coughing was keeping my husband awake. I got a total of about 15 hours of sleep in five days, and the one night when I got about four hours, it was because I apparently woke up in the middle of the night and drank 3/4 of the bottle of cough medicine my NP prescribed for me.
There was something eerily strange about being back downstairs in the family room on the love seat. It brought back so many memories, bordering on nostalgia almost. It's hard to imagine feeling nostalgic about such a difficult time in my life, but there was something special about that time. I felt so alone in the family room, but it wasn't a bad type of loneliness. It was true 'me time,' with only myself to worry about, only myself to entertain me, only myself to take care of. This type of absolute calm is pretty much unattainable outside of extreme instances like this.
In Cancer Land, I'm now 'on the other side,' meaning I'm done with active treatment. As I've mentioned before, it is harder than I thought it would be. Anti-climactic at best, depressing at worst. Part of the difficulty is surely because you don't understand why you feel the way that you do, which makes it hard to fix. Most of you is happy that your life is returning to normal, yet a small part of you craves pieces of what you had while in the throes of it all. Then you tell yourself you are crazy, who in their right mind would pine to re-live that experience all over again? But it's not the cancer you want, it's just bits and pieces of the experience. And part of that, for me, was that complete and total 'me time,' when it was just me and the trusty love seat.
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