I spent some time today thinking about how much time I am spending worrying, crying and just how sad and miserable I am. That doesn’t count all the time I spent on the internet asking all kinds of questions about cancer that certainly didn’t educate me but made me near to hysterical.
So here’s what I decided to do – I’m going to do what I have always done when faced with a problem. I am going to define the problem so that I can begin to solve it. I’m pretty sure that the problem is not that I have cancer; it’s how I am going to handle having cancer.
I have now met with the surgeon and the oncologist. I was pretty calm about my appointment with the surgeon. I thought that I had put this in a good place and was going to just “handle it”. Unfortunately, she showed me pictures of my cancer and now it’s too real. I have quite a bit of pain in my breast and under my arm so now I feel like I can see what’s going on in there everytime it hurts. That’s not helping me deal with things. I should add that I really liked my surgeon and she really does instill confidence.
THEN, I had an appointment with the oncologist. You see, somehow, seeing a surgeon wasn’t the same as seeing the oncologist. This, to me, became Oh My God, I have cancer! As she went through what all of our next steps will be, I was calm on the outside, falling apart on the inside. I know I will do what needs to be done but I haven’t absorbed it yet.
Okay, back to how am I going to pull myself together? I am usually methodical, organized and determined. But how do I do that when I don’t even know what has to be done. You see, maybe I was naïve and uninformed about what happens when you are diagnosed with cancer but it’s not like I imagined (not that I spent a lot of time imagining just this).
You see, I figured that after they told me the diagnosis, we would start doing all the things to get rid of it. I thought it would happen quickly and I would feel that we were moving along. Well, it’s not quite like that. There’s tests, tests and then more tests. And they are all spread weeks apart. It’s now March and we’re still where we were when I heard the words, “you have cancer”.
All this means that I can’t seem to make myself pull it together because I’m still waiting to hear all we need to know before they can start any kind of treatment. I feel like I’m on a treadmill and going nowhere, but I’m running like crazy.
The good news is the doctors understand this and try to be reassuring, but I need to tell you, it doesn’t help. Soon, I hope, I can begin to address this with a plan in my head to get myself together with all the right information.
