Life Goes On

I like to forget that I have cancer, but it's not something you can forget for long. Today I received some good advice from a woman 15 years younger than me who has just finished her cancer treatment - keep busy. It helps you to live a normal life, helps you forget for a little while that there's an army of errant cells in your body creating mayhem in your tissues and organs. It's good advice. But it's late at night, when the world is quiet, that the voice of cancer whispers into my stillness just before sleep: I have breast cancer. I can feel the lump but I don't know what's going on deep inside. So, I've begun an herbal program to cleanse my body. I didn't get this cancer out of the blue. While I wait for Moffit to call, I will do what I can to help my body build strength.

Even though I have cancer (and sometimes I would like to lay down on my bed and just stay there forever, safe in my secluded room), the dogs, cats and fish still need to be fed, the litter boxes still need to be cleaned, the house swept, vacuumed and dusted, the dishes washed, the laundry done, the lawn mowed, etc. And I'm the only one who can do it so I do it. In two weeks, grad school starts up again and I wonder if I will have the continued mental capacity and the physical stamina to tackle the work. (I'm lucky that my classes are online so I can do a lot of my work in pjs if I want to.)

And even though I have cancer, my mortgage company will still foreclose on my house if I can't sell it and I'll have to move, probably by Christmas. I need to move, though. I need a house with central heat and air. Living without it has become more difficult through the years and I'm sure that my sweating from the heat in my house after my biopsies contributed to the severe reaction I had to the Tegaderm tape used to keep my bandages plastered to my sore chest area.

Life goes on. I would like it to stop for awhile so I can become peaceful with what has happened, but it doesn't. The activity of life didn't stop after my mother died, it didn't stop after my father died, it didn't stop after my best friend Miriam died, and it's not gonna stop just because I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I am one of millions of women who have (and will) march down the road from illness to wholeness.