First things first: isn’t that thumbnail for my video just ridiculous? I’m positive that there is a way to fix that by selecting a more flattering screen grab but I decided I didn’t want to take the time to figure out how to do that. Time is money and money is time “they” say, and I didn’t want to spend the time figuring it out and called it good…well, good enough. I hope my time frugality affords you a good giggle at my expense. Moving on.
The PET scan felt like a big deal to me. It was my first PET, I had to fast, and it was early in the morning on the WAY south end of the Denver area. I had to get up early in the morning and somehow function with no coffee and the weight of the world on me! UGH! So I scheduled in a treat. This was the first of many, many, many treats that I felt I deserved for having to do many, many, many things I didn’t want to do. I need treats. Chris resigned himself to this reality. My treat for this particular day was getting my nails done. (Here’s the thing, if I have to hold this cancer caca in my hands then I am going to do it with great nails. That is one thing that I am so happy I did for myself through all this cancer caca, I kept my nails done.) I love having my nails done. I am constantly looking at my hands or my hands are holding the thing I’m looking at and I just get filled with delight when I have beautiful nails to accent daily activities. Dare I say that it makes my life better? I like things (vaguely gesturing at everything around me) just a little bit more when my nails done.
I really meant what I said in the vlog. I remember gearing up for what I was going to have to do. At that point I didn’t really know what was in store for me, but I knew it was going to be terrible. I felt the need to be really honest with myself, to shoot straight about how much this was going to suck but also consider how quickly it was going to be over. I just had to make it through the school year! Nine-ish months! By the time summer came along I would be finished with treatment and I would be a survivor. (At this point I was still blissfully unaware of how long this “short” period of time would be). I had no idea what it was like to be a cancer survivor but I was going to be one, and I was going to do all the shitty things that have to be done in order to be granted the title of Breast Cancer Survivor. That’s one thing that I decided I was going to know – I knew I was going to survive. I didn’t know how, but I knew. It’s like I wasn’t going to let the thought of any other outcomes emerge from my mouth, even if I was thinking about it and wrestling inside myself about the other possible outcomes. I decided to be calm about it. I was calm about it…Or maybe I was disassociating…yeah, probably that…either way I had shit to do and fitting cancer treatments into an already crazy life was going to require so much from me and my loved ones. I didn’t have enough energy to allow myself to be fearful. I have found that fear takes up a lot of energy. Fear is like a siphon to my soul. I’ve lived in fear before, I knew what it did to me, how it made me a shell of myself. I didn’t want to do that again. I would say that hindsight and lessons learned is my favorite part of getting older. I knew I wouldn’t be strong enough to fight cancer if I let fear dominate me. I knew how weak fear would leave me, I knew from experience.
My dear friend kept reminding me through all of this to take things “one day at a time”. I think that was how I was able to just start. Start seeing doctors, start scheduling surgeries, start learning what needed to be learned. Nothing can be finished without a beginning and I was ready to begin so that I would be one step closer, one day closer to the finish line. I kept thinking to myself “one day at a time”.
I also had a real urgency to get everything started so I could fit in as much treatment as possible in the remainder of 2024. We’d met our max out of pocket already for the year because of Chris’s heart surgery and I wanted to save us as much money as possible by fitting surgery and chemo in before the year ended. At first the surgeon told me I’d have to wait until October but I was able to get her to do the beginning of September. I was really thankful for that. Also, there was no way I wanted to wait two months with all of this hanging over my head! As I said above, I wanted to get started ASAP so that I could be finished ASAP! I would have had the surgery the next week if she’d been available. I didn’t want to live in anticipation for something so scary for too long. I knew it would wear on me too much. So the date was set for September 5th, 2024…the day I would lose two very important parts of me and the day it all got started.