New Year, New You
I had to use that title because the cliche is so bad/good.
I work in a copywriting department, and one of our rules is that if anyone uses the uber-trite "new year, new _____" convention in any of their social media posts, they'll be fired. Well, maybe not fired, but severely reprimanded, and the post will be deleted.
But it's oddly appropriate these days, as I go through this first set of cancer anniversaries: each of these milestones of the cancer journey that will make up my next year. I've already hit the first couple. They were strange. And I know I'm in for more, such as...
Dec 21st: when I found the lump
Jan 9th: when I went to the doctor and was referred for testing
Jan 12th: my 1st mammogram & ultrasound. Also the first time I saw Sad Cancer Face
Jan 18th: when the letter came to my house saying my scans were "highly suggestive of malignancy" and everything got very suddenly real
Jan 19th: the day I called my parents to tell them what was going on. I can still hear Dad's voice across the room, quizzical with a touch of fear saying "breast cancer? Kate?" Nobody in our family had it. That couldn't be right.
Jan 23rd: when Mom flew to New Orleans to be with me for the biopsy
Jan 24th: the series of violent core-needle biopsies that left me so sore and so bruised
Jan 30th: 9:30am on the nose, when I found out I had cancer
(I took this photo last year, at the first mammogram. It was the first of many hospital gown selfies. I had no idea how significant this photo would be in my personal history.)
It goes on from there. This whole year is going to be a series of checkpoints I'm passing through, reminding me of one of the most difficult calendar years of my life, even as I'm still going through it, in a way, with IV treatments continuing every three weeks through April, while still not being finally back in my house.
One year ago, I was a different person. I was only beginning to understand what I would go through, and I was so clueless about it all and in such denial. I was beginning to get worried that if this turned out to be something, I'd be missing Mardi Gras to have some kind of treatment. I was worried about my job, and about my home renovation—about missing out on my life again like I did after Katrina, and how many weeks it would take to get back home again. (I still can't believe that I was worried about Mardi Gras parades.)
Of course, there is the year of things I missed, from friends' birthdays to social events, to drinks with the girls from work, to missing all of crawfish season, which was hard, to all the morning walks on the levee with the pup, to the budding relationships that were cut short by my sudden absence and illness, to the person I used to be, for whom those things were the important things. And some of them still are, but in the last year, as cancer was cut out of me in multiple surgeries and as my body was first flooded with poison for months on end and then radiated for 7 weeks, as my very cells were forced to compensate and repair and rebuild who I am physically, it's meant a rebuilding of my whole psyche.
(Serious note: if you're having a boil, invite me. I have an entire season of crawfish consumption to make up for.)
I sometimes find myself thinking of my body as someone else's. When I'm driving and my arm brushes across my chest, and the right side is still hotter than the left even months after radiation was completed, it feels like I'm brushing across someone else's body. I've come to this very pragmatic disassociation in certain respects, wherein I'm fascinated scientifically by all the things my body has gone through and keeps going through. I'm the most interesting science project I've ever had.
There's a clinical education that you get as you go through the cancer process. I remember the day after I was diagnosed, I tried to join a facebook group for younger women with breast cancer and the questions they ask to admit you to the group (to filter out people trying to rip us off) are what your stage is, and what your grade is, and what kind of cancer it is. I had no idea that there was more than one kind of breast cancer, let alone a dozen or more. This was the beginning of my cancer education, and it would lead to a year of discovering new things and encountering new problems, and finding a way to solve them.
I feel like the cancer process reactivated a very logical, solution-oriented part of my brain in the best way. I'm finding myself drawn, even in work, to the more technical aspects of things, becoming more organized on every level, and geeking out about numbers and results, and having fun when people come to me with problems and I get to fix them. I'm noticing that I have less interest in the inconcrete. I want numbers, and progress—I want to see the knot untied. I want to dig out snags, and fix them, and move on, and I'm finding myself with limited patience for silly or vapid things. I still have fun, of course, but my definition of fun has changed a bit, especially as far as work goes, so that's something to navigate around.
(I know this is technically not putting out a fire, but I really like Moss.)
It's been strange coming back to the same job, doing the same thing, when everything else about my life has changed. During treatment, I was working full time, and then part time, and then I took the first part of chemo off, and then went back to part time, and then full time again, and at that point, getting back to the old routine was comforting. Even though I was Patient Kate most of the time, I was still Professional Kate some of the time, and I got to be Writer Kate when I had the time and stamina to write for my own website. I wrote a half-dozen blogs about cold-capping for various clients, one of which was shared in my chemo cold-cappers facebook group, which was a cool way to have my work come back around to my personal life. It was great during treatment to keep up with the things at which I knew I was good, and to reinforce to myself that I'm great at my job and that what I do matters to the small businesses that we help.
When I went back to full time in late August/early September, I found myself super excited to be taking back my responsibilities on the technical side of things in our copy/social media department, from SEO, to Facebook Advertising and Boosting/Targeting, as well as becoming the default go-to-girl for everyone's technical problems. I run spreadsheets and develop systems that allow me to track results daily, noticing when something is off and preventing small issues from getting large before anyone notices them, and I find myself totally getting off on this stuff now. I find comfort in a well-run spreadsheet, and in finite data, and in results that I can measure and use. I can count at least two dozen instances during the Holiday marketing season where I noticed something on one of my spreadsheets that I brought to the right person, and that quietly saved the day. And I love that. I want to do more of that. I don't know how, exactly, but I feel like my path is turning toward the technical aspects of marketing and publication. Of course, I still love to write, as is obvious by my long-winded blogs, but there's some shift happening and I want to pay attention to it.
At my old job, I used to manage people, and build systems, and find software solutions that helped us on a daily basis, and put out fires, and fix broken things, and figure out ways to change our workflow in a way that helped everyone involved, and I want to get back to that--to be able to fully utilize my systems-thinker brain. I'm not sure how, but it's the way things are going.
Physically, although I'm still really feeling the fatigue from the past year's treatments, I am beginning to notice in little ways my strength coming back, such as being able to run up stairs like I used to love to do, or wanting to park further away from the door of the Trader Joe's to get some extra steps in. I really want to find some kind of activity that I like, to become more active. I've joined WW (what used to be Weight Watchers) because the kind of treatment I went through causes weight gain, and I have read that a significant decrease in BMI is one of the best things you can do to reduce your chance of recurrence. I'm doing very well with the program, perhaps because I'm treating it like yet another science experiment instead of approaching it with all the emotion and shame and self-judgement that I would have a year ago. I just don't have time to get bogged down in silly ego crap anymore, be it in my own head or in my daily life.
So I guess in a way this whole year will be about reinvention, but the kind with data, and statistics, and science, and creative problem-solving. After months of shark-mode, where I've been just moving forward each day so I didn't float, I have this weird optimism about things. It’s as though I have this opportunity for a revolution of the self that I never realized before. I know I have a ton of work ahead of me, but I'm kind of excited for it.
Part of me is totally groaning right now, because I swore I'd never be this super cliché cancer person talking about a new lease on life, but, well, the hell with it--it's real and it's happening.
The way I see it, pretty much every day this year is going to be better than the same day last year. And given the option of dealing with the struggles I have now, or of going through cancer again, I know which I'd choose.