This is the last day

Today is the last day of my chemo protocol. I've been letting my mind veer away from thinking about it too much. As though it's a ghostly, insubstantial thing that will vanish if you look at it straight on. I try to keep it in my peripheral vision.

I'm not ready for cake and joy yet. I haven't even gotten to full on relief. I honestly do not know what life will look like. I don't know how to be a cancer survivor, especially with the looming fact of high rates of recurrence and continuing biweekly lab checks. I think I will be holding my breath for the next two years. But I have a fair chance of getting to do that. And maybe getting to lie in a hammock with a good book in the garden, to dig my hands into the soil, and taste things at the farmers market, and have a glass of wine with the people who have helped me to survive through all this.

Thinking of gardens and good books, I visited Robin McKinley's blog. And it turns out that her friend and fellow author, Diana Wynne Jones, died today. And besides being a terrible loss for her friends and family, and a grief to all the readers who have loved her books, it was a biting reminder of the realities of life, and death, with cancer.

Part of me may always be waiting to fall off the next precipice. And I am baffled by the idea of living with that fear and also with the grief for all the folks who don't even get a chance to try.

Two Years

This time two years ago I was sitting in a hospital bed. I'd been having weird health problems, inexplicable debilitating pain in my hips, exhaustion, and a low grade fever that just lingered and lingered. I went to the doctor, and then went for blood tests, and then got a call from the hospital where the labs were done, as I was driving home, saying I needed to come back right away, and to check in through the emergency room.

The doctor I saw there painstakingly avoided saying anything about cancer, but somehow, I picked it up from the way he was talking, or something. I was admitted, had a bone marrow biopsy, and was diagnosed w/ acute leukemia and transferred to a different hospital with the right specialists. And I had another bone marrow biopsy, done badly, which as torturous. They shouldn't hurt that way, but didn't know enough to protect myself. And so I sat in a hospital bed by myself, and tried to adjust to the idea that I would be receiving massive doses of a variety of chemotherapy drugs, continuously, for the next three years of my life.

I was just about to turn 25, and had all kinds of plans for the next few years. Instead, well, I have made it two years, and that feels like a pretty solid achievement sometimes. I am so tired, and so sad about the part of my life that I lost. And so scared, sometimes, that I think I could drown in it. My counts have been dropping for weeks, so now I'm back in that severely compromised state where I'm not supposed to do anything or go anywhere for fear of catching a fatal cold.

But hey, with any luck, I won't spend this birthday in the hospital, and that's something. No really, that's definitely something. And I'm counting down to finishing this chemo protocol in months now.