Follow up

I had my one month follow up yesterday.  It is hard to believe it has been a month already, and I nearly forgot the address for this blog.

There are some parts of treatment that are more comfortable than after its over.  During treatment there is a schedule and a regularity, however shitty it may be.  But at least there is a fairly clear expectation and something to do.  I think one of the hardest parts of being a cancer survivor is that there is not necessarily anything do do about it.  I don't know if that makes any sense to you.  It isn't that there aren't things you can do, really there are so many things one could get obsessive about it.  Depending on who you believe, cancer may be caused by everything from the bug spray on produce to the electromagnetic radiation that is collected and pooled underneath you by your mattress and box spring.  Everything from a little charred meat to half the stuff in a bottle of lotion might be on someone's list.  Just trying to figure out what should actually be avoided and what should be supplemented is maddening.  But that isn't really what I am getting at.

The best word I can come up with for the feeling, and it is more of a metaphor than definition by any means, is abyss.  You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail where he comes to the end of the tunnel and there is that huge canyon.  Imagine that without being able to see the other side.  I suppose in clinical terms it is what we talk about as "finding your new normal".  Lance talks about several months after he finished treatment and started to feel well again, he just didn't know what to do with himself.  I wonder if his drive may have just been to find or rather make meaning.  Not of the cancer specifically, though he does allude to that conclusion as well, but to make meaning of life.  I am not sure if it is to deny the abyss or just to that a meaningful life somehow becomes more necessary.  The other thing is that he and some many other cancer survivors had a life or something to get back to, and that becomes a vehicle to meet the rest of the world.

I have been a bit more withdrawn I guess recently.  I don't think it is all about the cancer, because other things are weighing on my mind and taking up my time as well.  It is not like I have been anti-social, I have just stayed busy with housemates new work friends, and stayed here.  In someways I have always been living parts of the life that I thought made sense to everyone else, because I don't really know how to live a life that makes sense to me.  It is as though I am so weighed down by all of the things I think I should have or need, kind of like David going out to battle Goliath in Saul's armor, that I know if step into the abyss I will drop like a stone.  If I could really let it all go I would soar on wings I never knew I had.

My life, my understanding is so not material; enigmatic, esoteric, abstract. In my application to grad school, I described it as the difference between building a wall with bricks and building with random stones.  It seems like all the directions are for brick walls, "just do it like this".  There are different patterns you can lay bricks in, there are some artistic things you can do, but still the brick is a know quantity.  I don't seem to have any of those bricks in my life, I have a bunch of stones, and I feel like I am have been trying to end up with a brick wall.  I know how to build with stones, but what I haven't figured out is how to make my stone wall fit into a brick world.