might as well let it all hang out

In a few weeks, I'll be "3 years out" from my diagnosis. I guess that's good. People seem to think it's good.

It doesn't feel like I've gotten nearly far enough. It's like you're on a swampy hike you didn't want to go on, didn't pack right for, and are kind of tired and want to go home from. Supposedly, five years beyond your diagnosis, you make your way out of the swamp, you're in the clear, and there is a....here I must pause. Most people might be able to end that sentence with "there is a big party awaiting you" or "they give you a nice, cold beer." Neither of those sounds like my style of celebrating, but it kind of deflates the sentence to say "you make your way out of the swamp and...you have a nice supper with your family."

In one way or another, the possibility of my cancer recurring is on my mind just about all the time. It's like it's tucked in one of those ridiculously shallow pockets they put on women's pants, and it falls out when I'm just walking around. I bend over -- over and over again -- to pick it back up.

It pains me that this is true, and it makes me wince to admit it here. But if I'm in the business of telling my truth, which would seem key to the promise-to-self in "writing therapy," I feel like I should come clean about the impact cancer has had on me.

It is for me what we call in the therapy biz a "narcissistic wound" to have been so changed by cancer (a narcissistic wound means "a blow to my ego," but the clinical term somehow sounds both more self-deprecating and self-inflating at the same time, which is a neat trick -- rarely, I will note, used by therapists when speaking of themselves). I didn't want to be one of those people who thought about their cancer so much. I guess there must be a part of me that thinks it is...narcissistic to do so. Gee, I'm practically talking myself into getting some therapy.

I was "compartmentalizing" (it's just going to be one of those posts, it seems) pretty well until the BRCA2 gene showed up this spring. I was going along assuming that I had had double my statistical share of lightning strikes to the noggin: the cancer in the first place, and then the more unusual, more aggressive "triple negative" nature of my tumor. My karmic dues were kind of paid up, is what I was thinking.

But then in March, when genetic testing showed a little broken bit, a tiny flaw in my otherwise pretty well-woven genetic vest, things changed. You wear clothes, right? All it takes is one broken thread and you've got a problem. Somewhere along the line, genetic stitch number 6141 hit a snag, "resulting in premature truncation of the BRCA2 protein at amino acid position 2003." About 5% of breast cancer patients have this broken thread in their genetic fabric. 

So I've become a little spooked; like that guy in South Carolina who's been hit by lightning a few times. You start to wonder if Zeus is taking aim at you with a thunderbolt when you're out and about in the weather of life. Maybe that's narcissistic, too, but there it is. Clearly I've got too much stuff in that damned pocket.

I'm okay. I'm changed. I just fell into a ditch on the hike, type of thing. Remember the hike? When I crawled out of the ditch, something about my path had been altered.

I have too much to say about all of this to cram it into one post. But I might as well tell you where I'm really at, since the funky gene means I'm on this hike for good.