The Eve of the 14th Year Anniversary - The Fears and the Aspirations of Living with Cancer
These days, I wake up stressing about what I need to do; not grateful for the simple reality that I woke up another day to live. Tomorrow I will wake up to the fourteenth anniversary of my diagnosis of advanced breast cancer with bone metastasis. Fourteen years. Waheguru. Thank you Waheguruji. Thank you, God.
This year feels different. Fear and doubt have been nudging against my resolve for days, perhaps even months, quietly, insistently. I feel pain, physical pain. In my back. My right lower leg. And ever since the second dose of the vaccine and the side effect of the swollen lymph node under my right armpit, I am subconsciously doing self-exams, almost incessantly sometimes. Real or phantom, explained or new - these pains seem to mock that I have lived well for fourteen years.
I reassure myself. The bone scan was just done on the eleventh of March. The foot MRI was even more recent. Dr. Smith did a full clinical exam on the second of April when I went in for treatment. The blood work from less than two weeks ago shows the tumor marker is stable. I am not missing anything. I am following all the protocols. I am being vigilant and fully alert. I am ok.
I have been wondering why it is harder this year. Why am I letting myself feel uncertain? I don’t want to squash the fears. I want to let them out. I feel like I will exhale fully tomorrow when I make it to fourteen years.
Perhaps my unease comes from my seeing how many lifetimes I have lived since the 13th of April 2007. I see all that I have been given. I realize how long fourteen years is. I worry for tomorrow as much as I celebrate today.
I wonder how much my book has unsettled me. I lived it all again as I wrote - starting with the first signs of any issues to the mammogram on the 13th of April 2007 when the doctor indicated that the calcifications in my right breast created an eighty percent probability that I had breast cancer. As I was developing the manuscript, I had placeholders where I was indicating how long I had been living with cancer. Thirteen years four months to start with. I didn’t want to round it up to fourteen years even as time got closer to the anniversary as I don’t take time for granted.
Perhaps the anniversary coinciding with two weeks to go till the publication of Fast Forward to Hope made publishing my book another of my life’s milestones I want to achieve. I have only read one book on cancer. Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, and that deeply moved me as much as motivated me to write my story. I read Paul’s book knowing he died before publishing it. Survivor’s guilt I realize is another thing that has been subtly plaguing me as I have written my book. I am glad, however, that I was able to express my thanks to Lucy Kalanithi for what their book meant to me and for her publishing their story.
As I struggled with a quiet melancholy and only became consciously aware of it as March became April, I realized that it may be tied to the heft of the anniversary being the fourteenth as much as my desire of getting through the milestone of the publication even as I continue to fight the disease.
As I understood my own emotions, I called back my strength. In my mind, I slowly filtered the lessons I had written about in my book about facing challenges to live well. I slowly played a couple of them out in my mind. I remembered my capacity and recognized that every day is an effort to give gratitude.
My gratitude is absolute. I don’t take the miracles lightly even if sometimes forget to do my part to stay focused on my wellness.
Today, I give thanks for today and the wonders of life.
Tomorrow, God willing, I will celebrate the Sikh new year (Vaisakhi), my friend Kevin’s birthday, and my fourteenth year anniversary with gratitude and joy.