What doesn't kill you makes you stronger (it can!)

A lot of people pass around a meme on social media that says something along the lines of "What didn't kill me didn't make stronger. It gave unhealthy coping mechanisms and a dark sense of humour, but it didn't make me stronger."

Now sure, it's funny, but I often find the exact opposite to be true. When I go through something awful, I usually learn a thing or two, whether it's a different way to look at certain situations, or new skills I can use in some way.

Battling cancer the first time definitely made me stronger. I'm generally not as scared this time--at least not right now! My primary emotion if anger. When the doctor told me I had relapsed, my response was to sigh, swear, and then snicker. Because it was just so absurd to me.

I mean, sure, I'm scared, and sometimes I'll get bouts of absolute terror. But I mostly can't help but take a "been there, done that" attitude to the whole thing, which makes it so much less scary than the last time, when I had no idea what was going on. Fear of the unknown sucks. So does the reality of the not-so-great prognosis of leukemia in general, but that's another discussion for another time.
So yeah, I'm scared, but mostly I'm just disappointed and sad, and above all, so incredibly angry. The anger outweighs the fear.

My life was going so well--settling down with my husband in a new city that I absolutely adore, both of us finally IN our careers, and finally having paid all off my debts--and then blam, this happens. A big giant train crash in the middle of my lifeline.

And I know once I get to the transplant stage, I'm probably going to get really scared all over again. Because the transplant is something new, and because so many things could go wrong with it, too. Also, there's not all that much of a plan C after that. So let's hope this goes well!

Relapse!

Yay, my cancer's back.

I guess if those asshole leukemic cells can be revived, so can this blog.

I think it's best I do that, so I don't constantly litter my social media (or Facebook anyway) with my cancer bitching. Ha ha ha!

I'm gonna need a bone marrow transplant this time. Ahhhhh, cancer, I'm so bored of you.

Grief, continued.

OK, I think I'm starting to get it now. About grief, I mean. It's not something that goes away, but something you learn to live with. A lot of people told me this, but I didn't understand it right away.

Now that it's been almost 7 months, I'm starting to feel the severity it of it now, with all these things that happen that I want to tell her about, and all these funny or silly memories I want to remind her about, that I can no longer tell her again, and I feel the gravity of them all building up in my head.

I realized that when Mike got back from his tour, although I was so beyond thrilled to have him back home (and I still very much am), it doesn't make the sadness disappear. It's still there, and it always will be there--I just need to get used to that being there and work around it. A short video I just watched illustrated this idea in a pretty simple way that helped me understand this, too.

You know, I was thinking--about Mike coming home and me still being sad, I mean. I think it's like..well, maybe something like this: imagine your leg is torn open in an accident and you're in horrible pain and even though you got your antibiotics and your stitches and your cast or whatever, you're still sitting there in agonizing pain wondering when you'll feel better. I mean, your leg was ripped apart--you feel like crap. Maybe some awesome things happen while you're nursing your destructed leg--you get visits from significant others, and family, and friends, or maybe you get to see a show or movie you've been wanting to see or even attend some kind of cool concert. You can be happy and enjoy that you get these happy things happening too, but it doesn't make your mangled, wounded leg feel any better. That bitter, burning, incomprehensibly nasty feeling is going to linger no matter what kind of activities you engage in, no matter who your company may be. 

What do you do with the inside jokes?!

It's remembering all the inside jokes that's the hardest. Not reminiscing about them, but remembering them and thinking how I'll go quote them to my mom...and then realizing I have no one to quote them to. The inside jokes will have to stay inside my head forever now. I can try to explain them to people, but there's no point, really. I just have to keep them to myself, and that sucks. That really, really sucks. 

On Twitter just now, I came across something my mom & I used to quote often, framed as a really funny joke, and for the first time in awhile, actually forgot--I actually went to copy/paste it to send to her--and then I was like, "What am I doing?"

I'm doing better these days in general but then there's moments (or entire days) where everything just feels awful and I don't feel like deriving joy from anything the world has to offer, because she no longer can, so it isn't fair. 

I guess this will forever be a cancer blog after all

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.

The past 7 months' constant anxiety & sadness

So since the summer, my mom's health has gone downhill incredibly; as she was so sick from the chemo, her body wasn't able to handle anymore, so she had to stop chemo all together (even though her doc was thinking about preparing different types).
So what happens when you stop taking chemo? Cancer metastizes! All over the fucking place. In her brain, mostly.

It didn't metastesize right away. For awhile, in the summer, she was doing really well, and she was even moved out of the hospital at one point and to a rehab center for physical therapy (she had to re-learn to walk after being bed-ridden for so long and being in a coma, etc). But then the cancer returned, and she had to go back to the hospital.

And then it spread. In her brain. They gave her radiation (as they couldn't give her any more chemo anymore), but it could only prolong her life a little; make her more comfortable. It can't stop the inevitable.

Since all of this (points to last post written in April), her decline has been pretty rapid. She still has her moments where she says things that are so "mom". But between all the morphine and the multiple tumours pressing down on her brain, it's kind of obvious that she's going to be acting quite differently.

Sometimes she has a hard time telling me and my sister apart (but she ALWAYS knows who we are), and she constantly forgets things. Like, absolutely no short-term memory at all. Again, to be expected.

Sometimes she says absolutely absurd things. The grammar's all there, but the nouns she'll throw in there are very strange. The best thing I can describe to is that it sounds like someone talking in their sleep. That non-nonsensical absurdity that still meets all grammar standards perfectly. The brain is weird like that.

She's always so happy to see me and my sister, and she definitely has these lucid moments where we have conversations like we always used to have, and I can still make her laugh. A lot. :) Those moments are amazing, to put it mildly. But also, those moments are getting further and further apart.
She is spending more and more of her time sleeping.

And of course, she's a whole province away. I have to take a 10-hour train ride every weekend (4-5 hours there, and then 4-5 hours back) to see her for a couple of days. To say the travel has been completely wearing me down is a huge understatement. I've changed it so that my visits are every second weekend instead, although that fills me with a huge amount of guilt I can't put into words. Nonetheless, the weekly weekend visits are just so hard on me.

It's also so hard to judge how much time she has left. The doctors had originally given her 2 months, and that was...well, about 2 months ago. I've heard of people being given a 2-month life expectancy die less than a week later. But I've also heard of people being given a 2-month life expectancy who end up living a lot longer 2 months. So who knows.  I think I've decided on continuing with bi-weekly visits, but am always ready to hop on the next train to Montreal should I get an emergency call.

It's been a walking nightmare, and that's the best way I can describe it. When she first got sick, I had nightmares of how she'd be when the cancer inevitably got worse. Now we're at that point, and I'm literally living out those nightmares. How often does one in life get to do that?  Not only is the stuff I kept dreaming about now coming true, but that gloomy, creepy feeling that follows me throughout those dreams...it's around me constantly, every day, in waking life.

It's been a horrible year.

Cancer for you! Cancer for me! Cancer for everyone!

I wrote this back in April of this year. April 2017. A lot has happened since then, which I will get to writing about and posting. Little by little. Because I need to.


Oh wow, hey old blog. It's been almost a year since I last posted here. Guess I just didn't feel like writing. Who knows? I can't remember anything. My short term memory is utter rubbish these days, because of all the stress. Looks like this may once again become another cancer blog, though this it'll be used for me to vent my stress regarding my mother's cancer instead of mine. She's relapsed more than once in the past couple of years, and things are getting tough--ha! I can't type that last sentence with a straight face! "Things are getting tough". Things are getting tough. That would be such a manageable thing, wouldn't it? When things get tough, you know you're going to get through it at some point. Eventually. Even if it's going to take awhile. But not this time. This time it feels likes some kind of nightmare-ish hell I don't think I'll ever be able to find the words to describe.

I will say this. As my mom was doing fine on the chemo she's been on in the past year and a half, I started to have horrible, gut-wrenching nightmares about what could happen if the chemo stopped working. How it would happen; from the very early beginning, our first indications that the chemo was no longer working, and how we'd handle it, all the way to dreaming it out right to the very end. Oh yeah, my subconscious is a very creative, sly motherfucker like that.  It's decided to take me on a journey of my mom's cancer that we were currently not even experiencing every single night while I was asleep. Well okay, not every night. Maybe 4-6 nights a week, which is certainly more than sufficient to steal enough sleep and sanity away from you and simultaneously inject you with intensive anxiety and sleeping problems you constantly wander around in a daze with, swearing to yourself how you'd never wish them on your worst enemy.
In some of the nightmares, my cancer came back too, so we had cancer together.
In others, my subconscious decided to take things up an artsy notch and put a metaphorical twist on my horrible adventures, so I had a bunch of gloomy stories framed in the absurd, in which it was so obvious who the catalyst really was, no matter how little you believe in dream interpretation.

Now after an exhausting, confusing, and draining year and a half of that, we finally get the real thing! So I'm walking around with that familiar dark gloom over everything, that unmistakable nightmare feeling, because that's exactly what this is; a nightmare (or many nightmares, for that matter) come to life.

My mom has been in the ICU for 3 weeks and can't even talk, as she's intubated. There's been little improvements here and there, but I think my sister described the nature of the ICU so perfectly when she said that you take 2 positive steps forward, then 18 steps backward. That's pretty much how it's been these past 3 weeks. Well, past month actually; she was admitted to the hospital on Good Friday, and has been there ever since, though she only got admitted to the ICU a week later. Why? Because the staff didn't know what the fuck they were doing. But that's another rant for another time.

I can't stress enough how fucked-up it is that this is not her cancer that's nearly killed her several times since she's ended up in the ICU. No, it's the new chemo she was switched to. The first chemo she was on was wonderful but it couldn't work forever, so they switched her, and boy did she react badly to it. And now we're in this situation.

Since she's been there she's nearly died a few times. I can't even begin to recount the number of calls and texts I've gotten telling me to hurry over or to call and be put on speaker, because they thought it was "the end". Yet she survived each time. We get these huge glimpses of hope, then it's all torn away from us again and again when she nearly dies.

I know it's the end, but how much time we have left exactly is a mystery. She can suddenly die tomorrow, or maybe get through this and live for another few weeks? Who knows. It would be great if we could talk to her again, as she's still intubated. When we talk to her, she can nod her head yes, or shake her head no, and make certain expressions and sort of (kind of) gesture with her hands (but not really), so there's something. (Though needless to say, that isn't much.) At least we're able to have some communication, however; a few weeks ago it was much worse, as she was under such heavy sedation and couldn't wake up, so there was zero communication happening at all. We spoke to her, hoping she could hear us, but when she finally woke up days later and asked if she remembered any of us being there, she shook her head no to all of us who had asked. So that kind of sucks. But what can you do, eh?

At least today, there was some improvement. I heard she was much more alert than usual, and managed to "ask" a bunch of questions--she still can't talk, of course, but with the nurses' help, and some gestures, she was able to communicate a lot of information she wanted to know, including how long she's been there and why she's on a respirator. It's interesting...I wonder what made her so alert now. I'm also curious about the fact that she doesn't seem to remember anything, despite the fact she was interacting with us over the past couple of weeks ever since she came out of sedation. This is more stuff I will need to find out for myself, when I am there this weekend.

Oh right, this weekend. I live in Toronto; my mom and pretty much all the rest of my family lives in Montreal (or near it). So I've been traveling to and from Toronto and Montreal on weekends to see her. It's been exhausting, to put it mildly. Obviously it's MORE than worth it to see my mom--I wouldn't dream of NOT doing it, and I wouldn't go so often if I didn't want to see her--but omg, the exhaustion of all this instability of traveling back and forth is exhausting and draining in and of itself, and certainly hasn't been helping the constant stress, anxiety and exhaustion I've been feeling to begin with.  But ah well. What can you do. (I won't even get into all the work I've missed and now am desperately trying to catch up on...ah, what a mess!) 

Anyway, life really sucks right now, and to say that's an understatement is basically a disservice to that word. I walk around crying a lot, and I don't want everyone to see, so I've been wearing sunglasses. So yeah. Next time you see someone wearing sunglasses in a shopping mall or on the subway or whatever, don't be a jackass and fun make of their strange fashion choice. They're probably just trying to hide the fact they're crying, because no matter what those coy little inspirational quotes like to tell you, let's face it: life just sucks sometimes.