5 Year Breast Cancer-versary

18 Jul 5 Year Breast Cancer-versary

Today is five years since I heard the words: “I’m sorry. It is breast cancer.” How does it feel to experience my 5 year breast cancer-versary?

I woke up too early…

3:30 am, I awoke achy and restless, screaming from nightmares.

My body clearly remembered. It remembered that five years ago today I’d awakened at 3:30 am, anxiously ruminating: “Do I have cancer in me right now?” 

I did.

I’d wake too early for days surrounding my mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy, and diagnosis, and then for weeks, surrounding surgeon visits, MRI’s, surgery prep, and double mastectomy, every time opening my eyes and for a moment feeling grateful for the new day, and then suddenly jolted again by the realization and terror: “I have cancer.”

The day I was diagnosed I made a conscious decision to share my journey on social media and blog/website. I made and posted this vide to announce my diagnosis. Visit http://www.BreastCancerWarrior.com to see some of my first posts.

I forced myself on a walk…

After finally sleeping a few more hours, I started on my favorite Flagstaff “fairy forest” trail, but soon caught myself pushing too hard and breathing too heavy, sweat dripping down my neck.

“I’m pushing my body so I can push the emotions out of my mind,” I heard myself admit. 

I stopped and stood still, said a prayer begging for grace, and then made myself tune in to those emotions, locating each in my body, listening, and feeling each one.

My husband called…

I thought he was calling to check in on me this morning; instead he started discussing an issue we’re having with one of our kids.

“I’m not dealing with that today,” I shot back. “I told you yesterday, today is five years since I was diagnosed. You didn’t listen, and now you’re acting like it shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is, and I don’t know how I feel about it, but I do know that I’m angry with you right now because you’re not respecting where I am today.”

“Respecting where I am today”…. Was I respecting where I am?

Immediately following my double mastectomy with expander placement. So sore. So out of it. My chest feeling empty and like rocks are filling it at the same time.

“I’m angry,” I heard myself say. 

Telling my husband off, it seemed so clear, but I wasn’t really angry with him–I’m not angry with him now (he apologized profusely, saying, ‘It’s not fair that you’ve had to spend half your ‘40’s dealing with cancer.”).

I am angry with cancer, and treatment, and all the damage it’s done to this poor body.

 I’m angry with how cancer changed everything forever, how breast cancer is actually chronic, how carrying the BRCA1 genetic mutation puts me on high alert for other cancers too.

I’m angry at all the chronic illnesses and issues and surgeries and permanent alterations breast cancer and treatment have caused.

“I feel pain, like a knife in my abdomen,” I then heard myself admit.

 I feel the pain of diagnosis, the pain of my double amputation, the pain of attempts to reconstruct the breasts that I’d used to nurse my babies and that had ended up trying to kill me, the pain of infections and hospitalizations and 15 surgeries.

I feel the pain of the loss of my uterus and ovaries and hormones, and all parts that made me feel like a woman, the pain of forced menopause at 44 years old and all it brings, the pain of the trauma of it all, the pain of the trauma work I seem to keep having to revisit.

“I feel anxiety, like a tornado in my chest,” I then said as I walked on.

I said it out loud–to God or to myself, or to both, I don’t know.

The anxiety that woke me early this morning, the anxiety that started before I knew for sure I had breast cancer, that started the moment I heard “something looks wrong” on my mammogram–this anxiety has become part of my body, mind, and life.

I stopped walking for a moment, prayed for relief, took a deep breath, and slowly began walking again.

In the ER exactly one week after my 9 hour DIEP Flap surgery, told I had a hernia and my “intestines were everywhere”. Emergency abdominal surgery (again) the next day.

“I feel fear, like a stone in my gut, holding me under water when I keep almost catching my breath.”

 Fear has been an ever-present ghost, hiding, shouting, stirring up trouble, and everything in between.

I’ve learned to call it out, like an exorcist, to bring it into the light, taking away some of its power.

But ghosts are still scary in the light: they still cause trouble until they’ve “crossed over.” I don’t see how this fear of recurrence will ever cross over and let me be again.

“I feel profound grief, like a heavy blanket over my soul” I felt, and sighed.

“I still have so much mourning to do.” Of all the emotions, grief has been most present.

Five years ago, immediately after the radiologist called and told me I had breast cancer, I said to my husband, “This feels like grief.” It’s felt so ever since. 

It’s grief from losing my body as I knew it, missing body parts, health, and wellness; it’s the grief of lost relationships; it’s the grief of losing “me.” 

“Who am I now?” is the ever-present question that, five years later, I’m only beginning to be able to answer.

It’s the grief of being sick so often, so intensely, and for so long, grief from the chronic impact I’ll be dealing with forever, grief for all I have had to do, all I can no longer do, and all I so wish I could do, feel, and be.

“And through it all is profound gratitude, hope, faith, and even joy,” I finally reassured myself.

It’s there, like the thread holding each piece of fabric together in this crazy quilt that is “life after cancer.”

These gracious things shine through in moments–like being able to do this hard, push-myself walk today, like being able to be here, five years later, to feel all these things. 

It’s here in my soul as I know I’ll never take health, family, faith, life for granted again. It’s here in my heart as I don’t know how to express what it means to be alive. 

It’s here as I write this.

And…these “positive” feelings don’t in any way negate any of the other powerful feelings living in me.

Call them “negative,” or call them “real,” like I do, they are there, and I choose to acknowledge, work to accept, and even work to heal them every day, in so many ways.

There is no going back.

There is only “B.C.” –Before Cancer–and “A.D.” –After Diagnosis.

There is only who and what and where I am now, today, five years later, in this moment.

There is the beauty and brutality, the humanity and the healing, the experience and the evolution.

There is only the paradox.

I’m living in the paradox of “alive” and facing my mortality over and over; I’m living in the paradox of grateful and grieving, hopeful and hurting, fearful and stepping forward into the dark with unshakable faith.

Together, all these things synergistically combine to create what has become known to me as “my  experience of breast cancer.”

Today, I am showing up to honor the experience as a whole.

I’m showing up not only to mark the milestone of five years resiliently surviving and five years alive; I’m showing up for the experience as a whole.

I’m shedding the tears.

I’m smiling and praising the miracles.

I’m saying it like I feel it today.

I’m reaching out to a friend who’s been there and can understand and will not judge.

I’m journaling, I’m writing this article, I’m resting and I’m taking a nap.

I’m being there for my children and husband who are feeling it in their own ways, too.

I’m being where I am–five years from my breast cancer diagnosis.

May 5, 2020, expander placement attempt 2, my 6th surgery overall.

I couldn’t have predicted how I’d feel today, or where I’d truly “be”.

I’ve shown up, and I’m grateful I can show up today, crazy-making and lonely and hard-to-comprehend as it may be.

Five years, and (hopefully) I’m cancer free.

Five years, and I’m still not free of cancer.

Will I ever be?