Surveillance/Survivorship is hard

Weird, right? Treatment sucks so you'd think that there would just be this wonderful easy moving forward and getting back to normal process. But it's not. 

During active treatment, you are taking things day by day or in small chunks to get to this big end goal which is, hopefully, the end of treatment and either remission or no evidence of disease. Your life has been flipped upside down and taken over by cancer but you have a goal and you are working through it and getting there. 

Then you hit the goal. You are done with treatment. Yay! Mentally though, it's still not over. You stress out with every scan and bloodwork hoping it's not going to come back. Your body takes a really long time to recover. And for me, I have no idea what to do now. Cancer has been my identity for 2 years. It has affected everything in my life. My body, my mind, my relationships, everything.

50% of my conversations with people for 2 years have been about my cancer. And I don't have an easy answer for people when they ask how I'm doing. They want to hear great, my cancer is gone, but it's not that simple. My answer involves saying that my scans are clean and my last pet scan had been clean other than the lung tumor that was completely removed by the surgery. They involve saying that my CEA levels are low and my Signatera (ctDNA test) came back negative and that I am currently in surveillance. There's no clear answer. The cancer could still come back. And that sits in my head. Cancer has taken up space in my brain. I'm working very hard to decrease the amount of space that cancer takes up in my brain but it won't ever be gone. It has moved in permanently.

So back to where do I go from here? Well, as I think and plan work and life, I keep in mind that at any time, the cancer could come back. So now I look at different jobs. I'm not looking at teaching because I can't imagine just having to leave my students if the cancer comes back. I tried to sub this year and I made it in 2 days. Maybe I'll get a couple more in before school ends but it's feeling less and less likely. So I need to look in a new direction for something that I can do from home and is flexible so that maybe I can keep doing it if the cancer does come back. I'm hoping I stop thinking like this in a few years but for now, this is where I am.

I need to come up with something new to do for work. My body is going to take a very long time to recover. My bloodwork is mostly normal other than a few things that need to get back to normal and will. I have mild fluid on my lungs and trace fluid around my heart, chronic sacral fractures (pelvis), aortic plaque, and a fatty liver. All these things are recent. None of them were around pre-treatment. My body took a pretty big hit and it's going to be ok. I'm doing everything I can to heal and recover and I will. This is my next challenge and I've got this.