Unfortunately! I guess this blog can't stray too far from its original purpose.
My "On This Day" on Facebook is a disaster zone of spooky posts from 2013, ten days before I first got admitted to the hospital and didn't come back out again for six weeks after being diagnosed with leukemia. It never gets old, every year--how fucking freaky it is, to read back on those posts just before everything went downhill, how clueless I was about my "constant flu" never going away.
And now it's been 5 years! So that means in April, I'll be in full remission, which I'm supposed to be excited about, but instead I'm just depressed, because my mom isn't around for it, and also because we both had cancer at the same time, except I beat it and she didn't, so it doesn't feel very celebratory, even though it should be, because I really, truly didn't think I would make it to 5 years.
When I got diagnosed, I remember reading in an AML pamphlet how low the life expectancy was at 3 years' time, let alone 5. The amount of survivors who made it to 5 years seemed like such a tiny percentage of people. There were times when I truly didn't think I would be alive five years from then, yet here I am. If I make it to April, yay! True remission, as declared by doctors.
When my mom died, a social worker, along with quite a few people I knew who had already gone through losing a parent, all said that one of the hardest things at first is landmark events and anniversaries. My mom died just a few weeks before Christmas, so when Christmas and New Year's came, I was still in quite the shock, and things were still feeling too surreal to really register. Not that things register all that great now, either. I still find it impossible to believe that my mom is gone. I keep thinking of things I want to tell her--no, need to tell her--and I stow them away in my head for later. But what "later"? There is no later, and there's never going to be. But I don't understand that, somehow. It only feels like she's away for just awhile, but that she'll be back eventually, and that's when I'll get to tell her all the things. My mind genuinely isn't able to grasp the fact that that's never going to happen. It's an absolutely incomprehensible concept; utterly foreign to me. It's just gibberish that I'm still struggling to understand.
Anyway, so going back to the anniversary thing. So yeah, Christmas and New Year's passed, and it was certainly weird as shit, but nothing too unmanageable, mostly because of how strange it all was. But now with this anniversary of when I was diagnosed with leukemia, and because it's such a landmark amount of time...this feels weird going through without my mom here, and by "weird" I mean terrible. Also, because of the nature of it all--the murderous disease that I got to survive but she didn't.
Also, it doesn't help that my birthday happens around the same time. (Yeah, being diagnosed with leukemia for my birthday...if you can't find the humour in that, then what's the point, really.) I dunno, it all feels like a bunch of too much to be going through at once.
I had more to say, but I've lost my train of thought, I think.
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