The Black Abyss
Six months out from the cancer diagnosis, and life is almost normal again.
Almost.
Except for those moments where you hold still too long, once or twice per week, and realize all over again, as if for the first time, that it might come back. That these few months might be the last healthy ones you have, and that even if cancer takes five years, or ten, to kill you, it will steal you away from your children much sooner. Because you'll be trapped in repeating cycles of chemo and surgery, pitted against an enemy too big for you or anyone else.
So you stand there, arrested, halfway down your front hallway and wonder what makes those 10-year survival rates from Adjuvant Online look so promising on some days and so devastating on others.
That's when you realize that you may not have ten years left to teach your children piano, or read them stories, or take them to Fuerta Ventura, or do any of those things you've been putting off, and so you have a whole new reason to feel guilty about everything you're not getting done.
And you wonder, with every potato chip or chocolate bar or failure to excercise, whether this lapse in health might be the straw that tips the camel's back, allowing some microscopic pocket of cancer to fester when it otherwise might have perished. Even though you know that lifestyle is only a very small piece of the cancer puzzle. Because it's the only piece you can control.
But it's too late to talk about control. Because of course it won't take cancer to sweep your world out from under you. A car accident would do just as well. Or a heart attack. Any loved one might vanish from your life, for any reason at all, and the laws of probability suggest that while the chances of this happening are slim on any given day, its eventual occurence is a certainty.
And you feel like a little worker ant who's spent her life traveling the edge of an abyss, who has only now paused to glance left and realize how big the world is, and how unpredictable, and how easily one might stumble and topple down, down, down and never come back.
That's when you do the only thing any sensible ant or person can do. You back away from the brink, and continue about your business, and go back to pretending that life is normal.
Almost.
Except for those moments where you hold still too long, once or twice per week, and realize all over again, as if for the first time, that it might come back. That these few months might be the last healthy ones you have, and that even if cancer takes five years, or ten, to kill you, it will steal you away from your children much sooner. Because you'll be trapped in repeating cycles of chemo and surgery, pitted against an enemy too big for you or anyone else.
So you stand there, arrested, halfway down your front hallway and wonder what makes those 10-year survival rates from Adjuvant Online look so promising on some days and so devastating on others.
That's when you realize that you may not have ten years left to teach your children piano, or read them stories, or take them to Fuerta Ventura, or do any of those things you've been putting off, and so you have a whole new reason to feel guilty about everything you're not getting done.
And you wonder, with every potato chip or chocolate bar or failure to excercise, whether this lapse in health might be the straw that tips the camel's back, allowing some microscopic pocket of cancer to fester when it otherwise might have perished. Even though you know that lifestyle is only a very small piece of the cancer puzzle. Because it's the only piece you can control.
But it's too late to talk about control. Because of course it won't take cancer to sweep your world out from under you. A car accident would do just as well. Or a heart attack. Any loved one might vanish from your life, for any reason at all, and the laws of probability suggest that while the chances of this happening are slim on any given day, its eventual occurence is a certainty.
And you feel like a little worker ant who's spent her life traveling the edge of an abyss, who has only now paused to glance left and realize how big the world is, and how unpredictable, and how easily one might stumble and topple down, down, down and never come back.
That's when you do the only thing any sensible ant or person can do. You back away from the brink, and continue about your business, and go back to pretending that life is normal.