“I’m afraid I have some bad news. It’s cancer”
It was 11:44 am and I had just gotten on to the treadmill to walk my daily three miles. I’ve been walking every day now for just over four years, the only exceptions being post surgeries and once when I was quite sick. Otherwise, every day whether I felt like it or not. But when the phone rang today I knew I had to answer it. “It’s cancer” were the words I heard.
Well, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting this news. I was pretty sure given my symptoms and the fact that intuitively I just “felt” it that I would be hearing bad news. Yet when I heard it I still felt the floor fall out from under me. Endometrial cancer, the tissue that lines the uterus. I had to take the time to pull my thoughts together quickly before Dr W would have to hang up. As I worked at this, he told me he would refer me to a gynecologist oncologist, one he really trusted unless I had one of my own. Being relatively new to the area I told him I’d rather go with his referral. I asked a few questions, obvious ones like “what’s next?”
So What’s Next?
The “what’s next” is simple enough – surgery to remove all my internal girl parts. At that time they would stage the cancer based on how far it has progressed and the next steps would be determined then. It could be anywhere from stopping at the surgery with complete recovery with no need for any follow up to needing chemotherapy and/or radiation. There were a few other questions but nothing worth noting.
How Do I Feel?
It is now four hours since getting the news. How do I feel? It seems like a simple enough question. How do I feel? I guess the easiest way to describe it is that it doesn’t feel quite real yet.
It is now six hours and perhaps now some of the reality has hit. But I really cannot say how that feels. Sometimes I find myself joking about it in some kind of macabre way. Then I think about everything that can be ahead of me. I remind myself that the only thing I really have to deal with is today, the present. If I want to make myself crazy, then deal with everything that could happen or go wrong.
I found myself thinking about what I can do right now to be proactive and I thought about looking to see if there is some kind of support group I might attend. Well, I feel like I found the motherload! Not only are there a bunch of various programs, it also isn’t all that far from here! How funny would it be to find that a potentially fatal diagnosis could bring me into a social group I never would have found otherwise. Interesting.
