On Going Home

I've been writing this post for months.

Making notes. Brainstorming in the shower.

I've been counting my life in packages of weeks since this whole cancer thing started: One week until you get the biopsy. Two weeks until you get results. Three weeks until the surgery. Four weeks until you're through with fertility preservation and ready for chemo. Twelve weeks of chemo. Six weeks to recuperate. Six weeks of radiation. Two weeks until the burns start to heal and the fatigue should start to wane. One more week of doctor's appointments. One week to pack it up and make the trip down south.

Those packages have somehow added up to nearly nine months, and now I'm about to go home again.

I'm trying to wrap my head around normal. What will normal be? I'll have to come up to Boston for follow-ups at least once a year from now, on. I'll be getting screening MRIs once a year. I'll be getting Herceptin infusions (some call it chemo-lite) every three weeks through this coming April, and then I'll be able to get the port taken out once again.

I'll always worry that this can come back--that it will happen again. That I'll lose another year. I'll always worry.

I thought I had a worst-case scenario complex after Katrina. I'd gotten those calls about the people I love being dead, self-inflicted or otherwise. I'd lost everything in a hurricane, including my job, my lifestyle, and my city the way it was. When I imagined some of the worst things that a phone call could be, those had come true for me in real life, so I developed a worst-case scenario complex , and started getting anxiety about risky things and non-risky things. When I found the lump, I tried to argue with myself that it wasn't anything to worry about, just a cyst or something, but my worst-case-scenario brain was telling me that it was cancer.

Getting the diagnosis was like feeding that puppy a treat. Now, when I get ready to go on a plane, I plan for how I survive when it crashes. I clean my room first. I'm certain that although statistically improbable, things could still go wrong, even though I hope like hell they won't. So I can only imagine what my brain is going to do when I get out of active treatment–when I get the NSD (no sign of disease).

Every ache will make me wonder if this is from treatment or if it's something new, or if there was a determined cell that outlasted chemo and dodged the radiation lasers and was more powerful than the Herceptin, and took root somewhere improbable.

Every annual scan will be a kind of re-traumatization.

There's something comforting that I didn't expect to get out of cancer treatment, and that is the sense that you have a team of people who are looking at everything super closely, so it's not likely that you'll die from something weird without warning. They'll catch all the other tuff that comes up.

When I'm no longer in active treatment, #teambewb goes away and it's back to #teamself and I can already feel the fear that goes along with that.

Still, I just want to be back home, measuring my time in months and years, in holidays and events and vacations, not in weeks and tests and surgeries and medical appointments.

It's happening. Soon. It'll be fall. I'll go from hot cider and sweater weather up north to hot pavement and air conditioning back home in New Orleans. I'll get to move back into my house with the construction done while I was gone, and start this new chapter in so many ways, with more space for me and more space for whomever I invite into my life with me moving forward, and with a new understanding about worst case scenarios. That they might always happen, but in case they don't, you'd better make plans for the best-case outcome, too.