In my mind, all of this plays out like a scene in a movie you’ve seen a million times: the main character is driving a little too fast down the street, there’s an iconic song blasting. You’re worrying that maybe she’s going to crash, or maybe she’s going to have the epiphany you know is lurking around the corner. On her face, the music allows the emotion to rise and fall like the notes pounding the walls of the car. She is happy and sad and pensive and victorious and angry. In the movie, the song ends, the scene ends. There’s no epiphany, but you know you’ll always remember the scene, and you’ll always remember the song.
Today, I drive with my daughter Annabelle and we blast “Praying,” by Kesha. It’s a song that never really had much meaning for me, except that it’s fun to play loud and scream the words. Today, though, maybe it’s my exhaustion or my anxiety or my fear, but I hear a lot of anguish in that song. I hear the sadness and the heartbreak and the desperation.
Annabelle feels it, too: I spy her mouthing words she does not know in the mirror, her body swaying with the emotion that even her six-year-old self knows the music evokes. And before I know it, I am crying. Again. Crying because I got bloodwork this morning, and the tiny prick in the bend of my elbow reminds me of the much larger pricks I had in two separate spots on my right arm during my surgery. The bruises left by the needles in both my arms took three weeks to heal, fading away ever so slowly, and I had to hide them from my girls because I looked like I was in a fight, and lost.
The bloodwork set me off. It made me tense, knowing I had to get it, and that I will have to do so every four months for the next ten years if I take the Tamoxifen as suggested. I don’t want to get it several times a year, because it reminds me that I was unwell and that I have to actively monitor my health instead of just be healthy. I don’t really want to take the medicine I’ve agreed to take, and I am annoyed by the commitment it requires of me. I’ve been feeling like shit the last couple of days, too. The nausea I felt when I started taking tamoxifen waned after a few weeks, and I was relieved. But this week it came back with a vengeance, coupled with exhaustion and dizziness. And my conscious mind knows this is all likely still me adjusting to my medicine. But my crazy mind has feasted on the idea that something is off, and I have been paralyzed by a cold fear that the cancer is back, that something else is wrong, that I am not ok.
I don’t really know what to do with myself when that cold fear grips. I try all the methods my therapist suggests: breathing through it, focusing on what’s actually happening *right now, talking to a loved one. Maybe that’s what I was doing in the car with Annabelle; therapy. Screaming the words of a song that evoked something in me, giving me an outlet for the pent up fear and anxiety I’ve been trying to live with these days. It’s so hard. I am a busy girl, and mostly I live my life very fully. I say no to very little, even when I am exhausted, and I rest even less. It’s almost like if I slow down, I will have to sit with the fact that I had cancer, and it is a part of my life forever. Even in writing that, I feel disbelief. In thinking it, it can’t be true. But I force myself to write it, to say it, because I know it’s true, and I am hoping to accept it. I am hoping to make peace with it, because I suspect I won’t find peace in myself if I don’t.
