cancer – day 175
My hands are really shaky today, I keep hitting the wrong keys and making typos so bad Word can’t guess any words for what I was trying to type. Argh.
I’m home in Volcanoville, and realizing that I don’t know my life anymore. I know that new life down in Sacramento living with Mark and being watched over, the life of the last six months or so of Cancer Girl. But that’s a temporary life, isn’t it? Won’t that life be over after radiation and a little recovery time? Then what?
All this time that I couldn’t come home because of chemo nausea and carsickness, I felt trapped in Sacramento and I missed my little house in the forest (literally – my home is in El Dorado National Forest), and at the same time I learned to live a different life somewhere else with almost none of my things, and I got used to it. So much so that even now sitting at my desk looking out at the beautiful view of the forest, I feel like I’m in the wrong place. They are definitely two different lives, neither of which is going to fit me come January, I think. It’s a huge unknown to me, what my life will look like when the immediate cancer treatment is over. Of course, then I’ll start on 5+ years of hormone treatment, and I get to put scar gel on my surgery scars every time I shower, so there’s no way I’ll forget I’m still Cancer Girl, even though come January I will have to try to act like a completely normal healthy person and do my job like a normal person and have a regular life again instead of cancer treatment life. But my old life doesn’t feel like it fits anymore. I feel so weird; I don’t even know how to write about it.
So I’ll write about something else. I’ve been meaning to blog about why we’re going to LA this weekend, and I don’t think I have, so, today’s the day.
Six years ago, a guy I’d dated for a little less than five years, Art (his family and I called him Artie), was killed in a motorcycle wreck, and the loss just destroyed me. We’d lived together and he’d been a part of my life for so long, and I really believed we’d have a happily ever after, kids, the whole life deal. And then he was gone, in this brutal wreck that just made it all the more horrific to deal with the loss.
Ever since then I’ve had roses placed at his grave every week, and every time I go anywhere near LA I make time to go to the cemetery where he’s buried in Rancho Palos Verdes. And every year on the anniversary of his death I go down there to put a dozen roses on his grave and have a morning or afternoon or day to spend there to just let myself grieve. Last year was the worst, emotionally. For some reason the fact that it was five years, that he’d now been gone as long as we’d been together, was especially painful. Though it’s still a couple more years before he’ll have been gone as long as I knew him.
It’s not painful on a daily basis now like it was the first couple of years, and obviously my life has gone on without him, but October 19th is still the most difficult day of my year, and the 19th of any month seems to have some minor significance that’s it’s been x years and y months since his death.
Back when they were scheduling my chemo, I kept counting out the weeks on my calendar to make sure October 19 was set up to be when I was supposed to have the least difficulty with side effects so that I could make the trip to LA again this year. It’s amazing that I ended up getting only three months of chemo and that October 19th ended up being in week 4 of the last chemo, between chemo and radiation.
This year is really different from the past five years because Mark is going with me, he’ll probably drive the whole way, actually. He worries about me driving with the neuropathy and fatigue and the general fogginess that I’m just very gradually coming out of. At least I’m back on my heart medication though, so there’s no fear that I’ll have a heart episode while driving, and I still drive very little. It was a strange conversation a month or two ago when I had to tell Mark why I want to make this trip to LA. It was actually a very short conversation, and I have no idea how he feels about the whole thing, but when I told him I needed to go he assumed he was going with me and I didn’t discourage it. I had no idea back then what kind of physical shape I’d be in at this point, and it was prudent not to assume I’d be capable of driving or flying to LA for the 19th. The last guy I dated (I’ve had two relationships since Artie died, one lasted a year and a half and now I’m with Mark) got really upset about the whole thing and said he couldn’t compete with a dead guy and I don’t see how you would since there’s nothing to compete with so needless to say that relationship didn’t last for a multitude of reasons. I don’t compare anyone to Artie, there’s no point. Artie was no saint, he was far from perfect, and that doesn’t change a thing either. It is what it is, it was what it was, and I am who I am, and much as I avoid dating (again, for a multitude of reasons), every once in a while something happens and I don’t think my annual trip to LA should cause anyone great concern. So anyway, that’s why we’re going to LA this weekend.