Guest blog by: Caroline Catlin ~ After Treatment Transition
After Treatment Transition
by: Caroline Catlin
On the night of my last chemo treatment, the sky split open.
Darkness filled my windows as rain and hail fell and collected in our flower boxes and doorstep. My partner and I stood in the open door, held in the light of our house, and gave thanks. I felt I was crossing the finish line, almost to the other side of this violent battle that had begun so unexpectedly I was still processing it happened at all.
Ten months before, I’d undergone surgery to remove a golf ball sized tumor from my right parietal lobe. We had been assured it was likelhy benign, or at least, a low-grade glioma. Discharged from the ICU, I felt the worst was behind me. And then, six days later, the pathology report showed that the tumor was not low-grade or benign, but rather a rare and aggressive type of brain cancer. A grade three out of four, called Anaplastic Astrocytoma. Devastated yet determined, I marched forward into months of radiation, chemo, and exhaustion.
The finish line, the end of chemo, the wild storm, it all felt like it made sense within the narrative I’d heard. Cancer, struggle, recovery, relief. And yet, as the weeks post treatment unfolded into each other, it became clear to me that would not be my reality. My cancer is considered incurable, although treatable. The last conversation around prognosis I’d had with my oncologist had been promising — he predicted it’d be at least two years until the tumor returned. My cancer tends to return, and when it does, it tends to return as a higher grade than it was before, often terminal.
I understood that intellectually, but it wasn’t until treatment finished that I felt that the truth of my predicted prognosis begin to take up space in my body and brain. As my days emptied of appointments and hospitals, I felt lost. I wasn’t sure what to do with what was left behind. My community — so present and giving during the past year — seemed to take a deep breath and a step back. I was safe, finally, it seemed they thought, we could all rest.
For me, it felt that the true work of cancer had just begun. I stopped reaching out for support and instead spent many afternoons sleeping or walking around my neighborhood, my body slow and stiff, weakened by so many months of filling it with poison. I cried often, curling my body around pillows and cursing the universe for giving me this burden. I felt I was waiting for recurrence defeated by the anticipation of what was possibly to come.
In many ways, my life post cancer has felt harder than what came before it. Living in the shadow of an illness that has stripped me of my strength and agency often feels difficult to hold.
We are supposed to be grateful, I think, as survivors. It’s expected we’ll be filled with gratitude for life and the chance to stop pumping our veins with chemo, to stop subjecting our bodies to surgeries and procedures and needles. And, don’t get me wrong, I think we often are.
But beyond that, there’s also grief. Fierce grief that takes up entire days with its width and depth. In many ways, it’s not an end. It’s a restart. A beginning — an exit through a door that walks us straight into a new room.
I think often about the storm on my final night of treatment. How it rained harder than I had experienced before or since. I thought then it was a release of all that had come before, a grand finale of an ending. And in many ways, it was. Yet it was also something else, an opening, a reminder, a remarkable unruly storm. Representing not just what had happened before, but all that was still to come. A lifetime of this. Of survivor, fighter, griever, healer.
A reminder that my job is just to stand in the doorway, surrounded by light, welcoming it all.
