Cancer Sucks - Part 3

Have you ever had a day where you thought that you might never be happy ever again? I’ve had a string of those days. I have trouble sometimes remembering a time before them. It kills me a little bit each day to see my husband in pain. To hear his hissed intakes of breath when he shifts wrong against his tumor. To watch him wince and try to grin through it. To know that his cancer is growing and slowly killing him and it’s still 29 days until treatment…which will only bring on new levels of misery.

I try clinging to the little blessings. His surgery went well and he’s physically healed nicely. Mentally and emotionally is another story altogether though. He’s adapting as well as I think anyone could, but it’s been so hard on him and I feel helpless in that internal battle as much as I feel quite helpless in the battle against the cancer. The outpouring of love and support has been greater than either of us could have ever thought possible and sometimes those little things get me through the day.

We sign the trial paperwork tomorrow and we’re praying Seth still has a spot because last week it was filling up so quickly that our research coordinator emailed us to move our date up from Wednesday. Chemo starts on May 16th. We have no real idea what to expect, but the Oncologists have said that the symptoms will be be mostly episodic, so once we get the first one under our belt, we should know what to expect of the rest. After chemo is radiation and then after radiation will be a major surgery and our hope is that by that time, everything will shrink enough to be fully resected. If not…that will just be the first of several surgeries. potentially. But I’m not going to think about that right now.

In other news, I signed on to be an Arbonne consultant because I know that one day soon I’ll need the extra income from somewhere…but it currently feels like an added stress on me because I can’t keep up with my current obligations, and so how am I possibly to add new ones to it? I love the product and I’ve been using it for years, but there seem to be a lot of expectations of their consultants, and I’m not sure I’m ready to handle that kind of pressure just yet. Not when I already have so many balls up in the air and I’m dropping them left and right. I hate letting people down and I feel as though that’s all I’m capable of lately.

For now we are trying to do fun things, things that don’t revolve around cancer, but it’s been tough disconnecting from the depression it’s brought into this house and into our very skin. It coats us with its stench and some days are harder to break free of it than others.