Patience

So patience is not a virtue that I have ever been endowed with.  This whole process has given me a test greater than anything I’ve ever experienced because I have had to exercise patience.  I hate it. Yes, I hate cancer, I hate side effects, I hate billing, but mostly, I hate that I am forced to be patient and wait for answers, results, next steps, etc.  So here’s to never being a patient person and just recognizing that is my cross to bear and powering through.

I mentioned on Facebook a week ago that I had finished my last chemo (I hope).  It was the strangest, anti-climatic, anxiety causing experience yet.  The post generated over 100 likes and dozens of comments congratulating me and all I could think is – did I post that pre-maturely? Am I really done? What if the doctor tells me they found something else and I had to do more chemo? What if during the mastectomy they find cancer in the other breast?  I spent three days on an emotional rollercoaster worried that I wasn’t really done. And I guess in a way maybe I never will be.  I will always be a cancer patient, I will always have to watch for any signs that it might return and I might have to fight again.  But I fought it well this time, and I’m fairly confident I can fight it well again, maybe even better because I know what to expect.

So I am now a week out from hopefully my last chemo and I’m still in recovery mode.  I knew these would be cumulative, but I wasn’t prepared for the level of exhaustion I faced on Sunday.  One thing I’ve always loved to do is go for a walk.  Ever since I’ve been a little girl I remember walking the dog with my dad around the block, I enjoy it as a form of exercise, it allows me my zen moments.  Walking with Brent though is a new form of frustration as he doesn’t walk, he moseys.  Before meeting him I didn’t know it was possible to walk so slow yet I am constantly trying to get him to walk with me so we can both get in shape and lose weight.  Well Sunday we headed to Spokane for more doctoring and I spent the entire trip sleeping, feeling more exhausted than I knew possible.  We got to town and decided to stretch our legs at a local shopping mall.  I could barely keep Brent in sight and was wondering why he was running.  He stated it was so enjoyable walking with me while I was in this condition because I finally was going at a reasonable pace, and wasn’t it nice to be able to notice all that was going on around us rather than rushing to the next stop? Seriously, all I could think of is – ooh, look, Sears has its patio furniture out I can go sit down. But it seems I have turned a corner and other than the awesome lingering acid reflux I am slowly weaning myself from the dozen drugs they have prescribed me to deal with side effects.

So now I get to wait, wait for surgeries, test results and a lifetime of monitoring to see if cancer returns. The doctors in Spokane were positive and found no evidence of uterine cancer and I spent the day running around doing pre-surgery appointments (getting an EKG, chest X-ray, abdominal CT’s) only to return home, ready for my surgery on the 20th of February to be informed they are doing it on the 20th of March? Excuse me?? When was this decided?  Bring on the full blown melt down (I’m really good at those these days).  The last time I met with my oncologist she had made it pretty clear that there was a “sweet spot” that they wanted to do the mastectomy and that was 3-4 weeks post chemo.  The thought behind this is it gives my body long enough time to recover but isn’t so long that cancer returns to those tissues that obviously are prone to cancer, especially since I am not doing radiation.  Suffice it to say I let the nurse have it, called and left a message for the doctor, got a return call from a different nurse and have come slightly off the edge (not completely).  The explanation given to me as of this writing was that a) a nurse should’ve called me and explained this a long time ago and the second nurse was quite perturbed that this was the first I was hearing of this b) they were trying to coordinate multiple surgeons schedules so they could do the removal and reconstruction at the same time and it just so happened that March 20th was the first day that everyone could align, but c) because my cancer is gone (and this isn’t the case for all patients) that we had the luxury to wait a little while.  My margins were clean, the lymph nodes were clean, chemo attacked anything that might’ve been lingering, so although I have an aggressive form it is gone from my body.  Not sure I am in love with any of the answers and pretty much let the nurse know that.  I did not want to sacrifice my health because of the convenience of some pompous plastic surgeon who all along has been pushing for delayed reconstruction and that there were other surgeons in that office just as qualified as him to do the reconstruction, but if surgeries can’t be scheduled then lets get the first one out of the way ASAP as I don’t want a recurrence.  The nurse is going to call me back tomorrow, so here’s to being vocal and bitchy (and I’m not even hyped up on ‘roids right now). Not sure what I will do now, maybe I will end up with delayed reconstruction, but I am not happy at this point and will essentially tell them if that is the case I’m not doing it with the first plastic surgeon (ya, I can carry a chip on my shoulder!).

But the bottom line is by the end of this spring I will have surgery completed, I will hopefully be on the road to recovery, and most importantly I hope to still be cancer free! Thanks for being on this ride with me!