When I thought about writing this post I imagined it would be long, exciting, and full of detail—a big momentous step in the process I’d be excited to share with all of you (whoever you all are out there).

Turns out it’s not going to be that kind of post.

Here’s where we stand:

1. I had my expander-to-implant swap surgery on the 23rd. It went well. I’m healing well. I had my post-op. My plastic surgeon’s happy. I’m still on movement restriction and start PT in 10 days. Pain was super minimal and is currently non-existent. Maybe a tiny bit sore?
2. I had my MRI—the one that would tell us how much the rectal tumor shrank as a result of chemo and if we could skip radiation (saving me more weeks of treatment, pain, possible surgical complications, and risk of sexual dysfunction) and go straight to surgery. Well, the tumor shrank enough to skip radiation and go straight to surgery. The two to three suspicious lymph nodes I had before are still suspicious but they are also smaller. Surgery will happen July 28th, as planned. The plan for “follow-up” chemo will be made after the pathology results are back, on or around August 13th. 

I’m fully aware that these two things are worth celebrating. 

I guess I’m just… exhausted? 

Behind the big scenes has been:

1. Continued hair loss. Worse in the last two to three weeks than ever. I absolutely dread washing my hair.
2. Continued hot flashes that wake me from sleep multiple times a night. I got some meds for this so hopefully they’ll help. (Ladies, it’s called Veozah and is non-hormonal support for hot flashes. Google it if you need support.)
3. Unbelievable wake-me-from-sleep stomach pain this past Monday morning that had me emailing my plastic surgeon at 6am asking if I could please go off antibiotics and my intense cycle of Tylenol/Ibuprofen. She said yes and to go on Prilosec. Things have calmed down and I can now eat again. (My team thinks this happened because chemo blasted my insides so I guess I’m less tolerant to the same med cycle I was on for my mastectomy.)
4. Arguably the two worst mental health days of this whole thing.
5. Singatera. I haven’t written about this yet but I’ve been doing a blood test every six weeks since starting chemo that detects tiny fragments of DNA from my rectal tumor circulating in my bloodstream. Right now we’re using it as another way to track how well chemo is working before surgery. Later, once I’m hopefully in a “no evidence of disease” state, it’ll help monitor for recurrence. My number dropped significantly between test one and two, then dropped to zero in test three which warranted a very enthusiastic call from my oncologist. Then, the latest test came back positive. A very small number, but still positive. When I met with my oncologist this week, he told me he isn’t “worried,” per say, but he does “have his eye on it.” He was really hoping we’d see a string of negative tests. So was I. For now, we’ve decided to stop testing until after surgery.

My oncologist asked me again why we’re waiting until the 28th for surgery. He seems to always be asking why we’re waiting even though he knows the deal. I had to tell him again that this surgery is scheduled for five weeks after my expander-to-implant swap surgery and my plastic surgeon said I really needed at least four weeks to recover. Just like my body needed time to recover from the mastectomy before starting chemo (we waited four weeks), and between chemo and the expander-to-implant swap surgery (again, four weeks), and between the next two surgeries (five weeks)… there’s literally only so much a body and a nervous system can handle. 

And this next surgery is the big one.
(Which is insane to think about.)

I’ve been trying really hard to remind myself that my body and mind are being asked to endure an extraordinary amount of consecutive traumas in a short amount of time (that feels like an epically-long amount of time…) on the heels of a different set of traumas. But, gentleness, patience, and self-compassion have never been my strong suits. 

Plus it’s really hard to keep your head right when your body feels like shit.

My therapist gave me an assignment for this week: write a list of things I need to accept. Turns out I’ve been resisting a lot (and resisting leads to suffering). Somewhat surprisingly to me, the first thing on my list was “I have cancer.” 

Two cancers.

Which then brought on the aforementioned two horrible mental health days.

Which brings us back to the old adage, “one day at a time.” But as we’re seeing, sometimes even that is too much. So I need to figure out how to get through smaller bits—30 minutes?—at a time for the next many, many, many months of this treatment process.

I feel like I’ve said this a million times.

I just don’t really know how to do it.

Acceptance, apparently, is not a one-and-done deal. It seems to be something we have to practice over, and over, and over again.

 

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