The moment my radiation oncologist stepped through the doorway of my small hospital examination room in Bellevue, Washington, my husband blurted out the question: “Did you guys get the cancer?”
It had been on our minds for the past three months, ever since I completed weeks of grueling rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and brachytherapy to treat my stage 2 cervical cancer. Last week, it was finally time for follow-up Pet and CT scans to find out if all of those toxic drugs and needles in my cervix did the trick.
I sat in a chair listening to Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, taking swigs of a glucose drink every 15 minutes, as a nurse shot radioactive dye into a vein in my arm. I’d taken a Xanax to quell the anxiety that had been building for weeks now about what these tests would show. An hour later, when I settled inside a large circular machine, I felt downright relaxed – now only slightly worried about my extremely full bladder.
The following day, someone from the hospital left a voicemail letting me know that the results looked good and that they hadn’t found any new growth. But the way they framed it, still left me with questions. Does that mean the old stuff is still there? Am I actually in remission?
Days later, I got the answer we were all hoping for.
“Yes,” the doctor said simply, “consider yourself in remission.”
My husband, Eric, is thrilled. My 16-year-old son and 21-year-old daughter are relieved. I’ve been receiving hundreds of messages on social media from friends and family, telling me what a fighter I am and how excited they are about the results.
As for me, well I’m certainly not unhappy. But I’m just not sure I’m happy.
For the past three months my body has made it very clear that the cancer might be gone, but nothing about this process is over. Almost every day, I’m hit by an intense cramping that begins in my abdomen and then radiates out to my hips and down my legs. It reminds me of childbirth or the worst period cramps in the world.
Then there’s the nausea and fatigue that some days is so bad I’m not able to get out of bed until late in the afternoon. When I do finally get up, I feel like I have weights attached to my limbs and my brain is a cloudy mess. I have no energy to talk with other people or even eat.
It’s as though the treatment removed the cancer, but also replaced me with some type of low-res version of myself. That’s the part they leave out of those perfectly packaged cancer survival stories.
Not that there’s much I could be doing during the pandemic. Even in remission, my numbers aren’t perfect and I could still be at risk of severe illness from coronavirus. And of course, there’s my son’s asthma and my husband’s artificial heart valve, so we’re being very careful.
We’ve been to a small farmers’ market in town and taken the kids to a few empty mom-and-pop retro gaming stores recently. But we’re still not eating in restaurants or shopping inside grocery stores and my son will be doing his junior year of high school remotely.
But I think the main reason I can’t seem to get myself excited about the scan results is because of what happened to my mom 10 years ago. She had ocular melanoma and was in remission for a few years. She went in for her annual scan in San Francisco and they discovered her liver had become basically a giant tumor. She died around eight months later, at the age of 62.
I’m going to turn 50 in December, and now I wonder if I’m going to have a similar experience and whether I’ll even make it to 62.
Hours after I met with my doctor, I sat in my backyard with two friends from the neighborhood. They’ve been by my side since the beginning – bringing me dinner and texting me every morning to check in on me. When I told them the good news, they brought over champagne and congratulated me as we toasted from 10ft away from one another.
After months of conversations centered on my cancer and treatment, the news meant the discussion soon naturally drifted away from my health. We talked about other things, like a friend’s breakup.
I think for them and all of those people who sent well wishes on social media, I’ve made it to the other side. This whole cancer process is finished. But for me, who will have to brace for new scans every six months and attempt to teach my body how to be itself again, the healing process still has a long way to go.
