Part 12: Angry Eyebrows, Chemo 5
My grumpiness persisted and I struggled to push through the difficult winter blues. I maintained my morning walking routine — now through the February snow — followed by a cold dip, and I continued to work. These things and my family were my rock — something to hold onto, put my back up against, and keep moving forward. Just keep going, I thought. Keep stepping.
But boy, was I hacked off at the world. Grumpy doesn’t begin to cover it. I tried to shut my mind off. I would go to bed early just to end my miserable day, hoping to wake up with a different attitude in the morning. One morning my son asked me, “Mom, why are you so angry?” I berated myself for bringing such difficult emotions into our home. But then he said, “Oh wait — it’s just how you’ve drawn your eyebrows today. You drew angry eyebrows, Mom.” I didn’t redo them because I was angry. I went to work with angry eyebrows.
Even work, usually a welcome feature of my life, became hard. The dissonance was too great. I could no longer chat and smile at the coffee machine. I was on edge and turned inside out, like I was wearing my insides on the outside.
One day at work, I went to the bathroom and took my phone with me. I clicked into one of my ovarian cancer Facebook groups, and there was a post announcing the passing of one of its members. That’s not the language we use in the Facebook group — we say, “one of our Teal Sisters has gained her angel wings.” This had been happening a lot recently, maybe because people tried to hang on for the holidays. In this particular group, it was about one death announcement per week (one of the ladies posted a list of all deaths at the end of 2022, and it was 51 souls), but recently it was more. I started crying in the bathroom stall at work, sitting there on the toilet. Ovarian cancer was just so, so, so messed up, and I had nothing left inside me to cope. I had tried my best, I had put up a good fight — but I was broken.
February and chemo five finally came around, and my husband and I went through the motions: packing the chemo bag, warming up my veins, driving into the chemo centre, and meeting Dr. H for the pre-chemo consult. I asked Dr H. about my future. I knew that ovarian cancer has an average 80% recurrence rate, and I wanted to understand my percentage chance of recurrence. Nobody can predict the future, but I wanted him to give me his medically informed point of view.
But he took the conversation in a very different direction. He said, “This is not your case.” He said, “In your case, all the data points to you being healed.” By now, I had checked google-translate and both “heal” and “cure” translate into the same word in German — Heilung. I knew that when he said healed, he also meant cured. I explained to him that I understood ovarian cancer to be so recurrent that most people think of it as a chronic or incurable disease, which means that I will be waiting for it to recur. I could be lucky and wait 10 or 15 years, and I could be unlucky and wait just a few months.
“No.” Now he objected. “This is not what we see in your case, and that is not what the data shows.” He went through all the factors that led him to conclude that I was cured. He said that I could recur in theory, that anybody can recur, but in my specific case, the chances of recurrence were so low that they should not be taken into account. He said, “You have to understand that you have been through something that is a period of time in your life. And now that period is coming to an end, and you have the same life expectancy as you did before the cancer.”
By now, I was taking deep breaths, trying to keep myself under control, and wiping my eyes, glasses all fogged up, nose dripping. “Thank you,” I nodded. I was utterly overwhelmed.
He continued, “Once you’ve had cancer, you will never be the same again.” Then he turned and spoke directly to Bruce “You know, she sees the world differently now. Things have changed for her. For you, too, of course, but for her it’s really different and it’s something that only she can experience. You cannot understand it fully. She will have to learn how to move forward differently from here. She’s not going back to the same life that she left.”
Dr. H turned back to me. “It’s important that you take something good from this very difficult experience. Try to find out what that is, what will be different in your life, what will be better. Ask yourself how you will move forward differently as a result of this experience. Things are not the same for you as they used to be, but you will be okay.”
I nodded. I couldn’t talk. I felt understood.
As we left his office, Bruce turned back and asked Dr. H, “Does that mean she can say I had cancer instead of I have cancer?” Dr. H said, “Yes, that’s right.” And then Dr. H turned to me and said,
“You had cancer.”
