I survived!

I woke this morning before our alarm. I could feel energy pulsing through my veins. Is this what it’s like to feel normal again?

You may or may not have noticed that in my last post talking about chemo I had changed it all to past tense.

That’s right – I’M FINISHED!!!

Just this week Dr Hamilton, my oncologist, decided that three cycles of PCV is enough, and that any more chemo would mean the costs (long term and permanent side effects) would outweigh the potential benefits of continuing (more possible poisoning of potential cancer cells - all quite vague really).

***

At the beginning of chemo, when I heard there was a maximum of six cycles, I was pumped to do all six. “Give me all you’ve got,” I told Dr Hamilton.

Easy for someone to say when they are feeling fine, huh?

It should take a few months, they say, for me to return to the lower-end-of-average energy levels and platelet levels (bruising etc), and the tingling fingers and aching jaw should subside a little within six but will likely never come fully right. But as for dizziness, headaches and vomiting through the night – I said goodbye to them as I walked out of Dr Hamilton’s office the other day.

Not to mention, the pills and IV injections and all that poison…it’s all over. It really makes me realise what a privilege it is to be able to nourish my body and not poison it.

***

And no longer can I say “I have a brain tumour,” “I have cancer,” or even “I’m having treatment,” – what does that make me now? It feels a little strange to no longer be any of these, even though it’s all gone so fast. A survivor, perhaps? Although I have a suspicion I’ll need to reach a two-year or five-year mark before I can join that club.

Oh, what the heck. I’m a survivor. 

Identity and learning

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago - sorry I only am just getting around to posting it!)

  ...

I think I’m having an identity crisis.

Alton, a wonderful mentor and professor at the University of Idaho, asked me before we left Moscow what my main lesson had been over the three years. I told him with sureness, “I have learned to love.”

Despite love being something I’ve since found that you can’t “know” once and for all and you can never fully learn it, it’s probably a fair statement considering the anti-love, anti-commitment girl that started at the university in January 2010.

I took a big exam this a while ago. I didn’t do very well. In fact, I left before anyone else, leaving multiple blank answers. It was something I thought I was “good at” – general knowledge, writing, basic grammar and numeracy, and last but not least, exams. I thought that stuff came naturally.

I thought journalism stuff comes naturally, that’s one of the main reasons I’m doing it.

In Idaho I studied Anthropology and International Studies. Of course, despite all that training, I didn’t come away telling Alton, “I learned to be an anthropologist.” No, I learned about love.

What on earth am I learning about now? I wonder, as I lie on our bed with a headache and barely energy to type.

Perhaps it is to learn. That’s what I’ve been wondering today anyway.  “Learning to learn” was the catch-phrase when I went to school. I should have taken that more seriously.

Now, faced with my own inadequacies, I see that I can’t, and don’t want to, just float on by doing things last minute and still getting “good grades” (quotation marks implying I don’t know what the worth of those really were in the end). I want to, and need to, truly learn things. Repeat. Visualise. Discuss. Articulate. Question. Repeat.

Or perhaps it is to say sorry. That’s something I’ve always struggled with, that humility thing. I may say it was the cancer that has “brought me to my knees,” but don’t believe it.

The cancer was only a trigger. It was a situation I found myself in that required me to rely on others, and that made me act out of character and have to apologise for it. I didn’t want it to be an excuse, ever.

I guess time will tell what I’m learning from this stage of life. I hope, and am sure; it’s not just journalism.