But today is a milestone. It marks the one-year anniversary of the discovery of the lump in my breast. I am not big on anniversaries of most kinds, but I have found myself thinking a great deal about this one. After my doctor discovered the lump, things moved very quickly at first, and then seemed to go in fits and starts. Eventually, I settled into a very regular routine with my weekly Herceptin treatments and chemo every three weeks from early November to early March. After that I fell into the routine of daily radiation, five days a week for six weeks through the end of May. I found that I quickly adopted the mode of placing one foot in front of the other, which served me well through surgery, chemo and radiation.
But there is a sort of tunnel vision that comes along with that. I was focused on the present and going through each process of the treatment, and had pushed practically everything else to the side. But now, with the worst of it over, the blinders have been pulled off and I have been forced to see beyond my treatments to a much larger world. Questions I was grappling with before August 20th, 2010 have reared their head again. Big questions, like, what do I really want to do with the rest of my life, having left my employer of 20+ years in June of 2007? How can I make a better living than I am right now and feel like I am doing something very worthwhile – for me and for others. Life-sized questions. Perhaps this sudden view of the bigger picture is part of what some refer to as post-treatment letdown. Dana Jennings of The New York Times wrote about his own experience with this phenomenon as he chronicled his cancer journey in the paper. His piece Losing A Comforting Ritual: Treatment hits home for me in many regards. It is as though after such intensity you finally are able to look up and outward beyond your own little world of appointments and treatments, and sometimes you are unsettled by what you see in terms of your own future and the state of the world.
So, until I resolve those questions, I have narrowed my vision again and continue to march along, one foot in front of the other until late October when I will stop receiving herceptin and will have my port removed. In the meantime, I wait and watch as my hair takes its sweet time filling in. My last chemo was March 7th. It is nearly five and a half months later and, although I have some fuzz on top, it looks like I’m suffering from male pattern baldness, with a ring of ever increasing dark fine fringe hair that circles my head. I want someone to take a crayon and color in the top, so I’m not mistaken for a monk. Is her head back in the sand, you ask? I think so for the moment.
