Anne SG and the Big C

The end. The end?

March 12, 2009 at 9:19 pm | Posted in breast cancer | 2 Comments

I haven’t posted here in ages. Eons.  Well, months.  I have been trying, all this time, to move beyond being Cancer Girl.  To stop being a cancer patient and to start being a cancer survivor.

It’s not as easy as it sounds.  When you’re very sick, and worried about everything from paying bills to your next year of life, there’s a sense of immediacy about everything you do–the most mundane tasks, the move serious decisions.  At the same time, the simplest pleasures are felt more purely.

After the worst passes and you wake up to regular life, with all its usual stresses and business, and sickness passes farther away from you, it’s harder to feel the purity of the moment, and easier to adjust to all the after-effects of illness.  For me, that means a permanently changed body, inside and out; there are changes you can see, and those you can’t.  I am not the person I used to be, and never will be.  That was okay when I was fighting for my life.  Now I have to get down to the business of accepting who I am, and figuring out where to take this new person.

For that reason, I am thinking I will draw this blog to a close.   I still live each day with constant nagging worries–whether that pain under my arm is my nemesis returned, for example.  But mostly I am re-learning how to parent after a year of Parenting in a Crisis, which is neither healthy nor productive.  Of course, my family is still living with crises (I really though we’d had enough in 2008, thankyouverymuch), but the immediacy of illness has faded.

This isn’t a journey I wish on anyone. I can’t say I’ve found all the answers–in fact, I think I have more questions now than ever.  But I can say, to anyone who has been here, that there are lessons to be learned.  We just have to stop and listen.

My new blog: I have a new one: http://naturekidz.blogspot.com.

Till then,

be well.