mayhem

Mayhem just walked out my front door and took with it my three sons and husband. 

The sheer willpower it takes to get all three ready for school/childcare looking like their parents care about them (i.e. dressed in correct uniform, bags containing lunch, teeth brushed and hair even possibly combed) is a multilayered task that I am sure uses every skill set Huz and I have acquired with our four university degrees between us.

The negotiation and people management alone should qualify me for a high paying role in a big corporation somewhere. I'm thinking of updating my resume…

But when mayhem left so did the fun. 

I listen to their chatter and footsteps on the deck, and then the 'click' of the gate and they're off. My tribe.

Now its just me here, with my water bag on my lower back, and I'm nestled in my 'spot' on the couch with the white pillow. I spend hours on this couch in the days following chemo. Technically I shouldn't need to gravitate here today. It's a week off chemo, and I should be full of beans and ready to go out into the big wide world and do all those things I've been dreaming of the past three weeks when I've been feeling so awful.

But here I am.

Maybe a bit of confidence knocked out of my sails, maybe I don't know how to be 'normal' anymore. Maybe there's just not much that I feel like doing to drag myself away from being all cozy.

I think it's got more to do with what I don't like to admit. 

I'm exhausted.

From treatment, from the CT scan a couple of days ago. From appointments with Dr K, from port access and blood tests. From Tennyson Centre where I go to have all this fun. From the cough and cold that I can't shake for the past three weeks. From the ever present anaemia.

It's not just the medical stuff though. I'm emotionally exhausted from the constant processing of this diagnosis, of what it means to have breast cancer spread throughout my body, of what the images from the scan looked like with all the tumours in my liver and bones. With knowing that when my back aches it's not muscular, but instead it's the holes in my bones from the tumours that are the cause. 

Yuck.

The CT scan showed that the cancer is stable. A good outcome by Dr K's standards. By my standards, it just sounds like a C+ when I was really after an A + for shrinking tumours.

I promise I will study harder for the next cancer exam.

But then, that's the problem isn't it?

Doesn't matter how faithfully I turn up each week for port access, blood work, appointments and chemotherapy, with a happy face on and a great attitude, then back home to lay on the couch with exhaustion for the next 6-7 days before I face it all again…well…look who's cancer doesn't really care. 

Yup. My cancer doesn't care.

I guess cancer is a hard task master, and an unreasonable one at that. Best to not look him straight in the eye in case he gets mad. I'll just keep sneaking in the chemo to beat him back and maybe he won't get so cross in the future.