Are we looking for the wrong thing?

As all cancer patients are told, after treatment you will find your 'new normal'. Basically you get to go back to being yourself again and regaining your life. But it never seems to happen.

A friend sent me this article from the New York Times on a young woman, after cancer, is looking for her old self, and being lost in transition from cancer land to her new self.

It made me think (a dangerous proposition at times). What if you are a non cancer (or non any major ailment) person, you go through life and you evolve slowly and your life changes, and its no big deal, its normal. Maybe you grow apart from some friends, gain new ones; start yoga and stop running; quit eating red meat and white sugar in order to be healthier; redecorate your house, or kept trying to lose those same damn 10 pounds. These changes happen over time but if you look at yourself from last year to this year, have you made changes? Probably. And unless you stop and think about it, you may not notice them.

With cancer (or insert any life changing diagnosis), you are yanked from your nice calm life and shifted into cancerland, riding the cancer roller coaster while holding hands with your friends, family, and oncology team who want to know about every sniffle. Then poof, you are pronounced 'cured',  get a little certificate from your chemo nurses, and your doctors don't want to see you for six months, instead of every week or month.

You are supposed to find your new normal by tomorrow morning and move on with your life, go back to work full time and be healthy, instantly.

Instead, you stumble around and wonder what a new normal is. You might be depressed, anxious, and still clinging to the cancer roller coaster at every ache and pain. Slowly you stabilize, still gasping from the whirlwind you went through for the past year.

You have lost some friends or even family who went running from the word cancer, in case it was contagious, but you gained some new ones. You got some new clothes, your work schedule changed, you bought yourself a present for surviving cancer treatment (I got myself a new watch), and you are still trying to lose the same damn 20 lbs (10 from before cancer and 10 from chemo).

And what if this is the new normal? What if its harder to find because you didn't evolve slowly but were yanked from your life to cancerland and then thrown back to your life? You have to pick away at the layers of changes to see what you like and don't like and try to get a handle on everything. Some of the changes that happened may not be the ones we want to keep but we have to learn to accept them.

We can never go back to the way we were, no matter how much we try. Who was it that wrote 'you can't go home again'? Its true, especially with cancer, we can't go home again, no matter how much we try.

Its not a tumor....

So life in cancerland is basically summed up by the one thought: "will it come back?"

As this child helpfully tells us in Kindergarten Cop, that is the one thing we can't get out of our heads.

Every ache and pain could be a something, meaning a bad something. We have to learn is how to balance that thought. Sometimes helpful people say wonderful, well meaning things like this to us which help raise our cancer-cootie-concern-level. Or sometimes a peak inside our insides in an MRI, PET or CT scan gives us bad news. At which point the cancerland roller coaster starts going up the really steep hill and becomes a whirling twisting ride until we hopefully can get back to the smaller hills.

No I am fine but this video popped up on my radar the other day and it makes a valid point.

That recurrence thing

Its the other elephant in the room that only the cancer person can understand. What do I do if it comes back????? As Barbara Jacoby points out over at Let Life Happen, we need a bit more focus on breast cancer, and other cancer, recurrences.

Ask any cancer patient that made it through treatment, the next concern is 'what if it comes back?' Well as my little voice of experience speaks up, at my second cancer diagnosis I was slightly  more prepared than my first. I  had a 'taking care of me plan' in place by day 2, even though I was so stressed about surgeries, chemo and all that fun.

Since I had already lived the cancer roller coaster for 26 years, I had some experience to fall back on. It didn't prevent me from completely freaking out but it did allow me to have a little voice inside me saying 'you did this one and got through it, you can do it again'. I also had the me plan in place.I was in a support group before my first surgery. I signed up for another support group - this one was introduction to breast cancer. At the end of treatment, when many cancer patients fall apart, I had a therapist. I blogged, I talked, and I coped with it all, with varying levels of anxiety.

My plan for cancer three is already in place. I don't care what kind of cancer it may be, but I will put me to the forefront once again. What will it take to keep me sane through the process? Probably more or continued therapy. Maybe a second opinion at some big fancy cancer hospital if its some kind of recurrence.

But what I would really like to see is more research into why some cancers recur and some don't and as to why some people are more likely to have their cancer recur than others. Give me some info people! I need to know. Thank you.