Some personal news

In which I hang in there

Yes, it’s been a while since I last wrote here. Don’t worry. In the immortal words of Pearl Jam, “heyyyyuhhhh [guttural noises] I’m still alive.” I’ve just been busy.

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. I feel incredibly lucky to have it; I’ve been trying to get a job like this for years now. I am a deeply superstitious person and can’t help but feel like dark cancer magic brought me the job. The universe owed me and now it’s paying. Getting things I’ve wanted for a long time all while the worst thing that’s ever happened to me keeps unfolding is… confusing.

People like to express their horror that I’m attempting to keep working through treatment. Maybe this is just the Stockholm syndrome I feel towards our late capitalist nightmare world, but working is helping me right now. I need to go somewhere during the day and do something other than google the side effects from the drugs I’m going to need to take for the next ten years.

It’s energizing to be closer than ever to fulfilling my creative ambitions, even if it does come with this weird feeling of living a double life (albeit the least exciting double life in the world, because my secret cancer activities are just napping and having diarrhea and going to the community acupuncture clinic). I go back and forth between feeling like a cancer patient pretending to be a normal person and a normal person pretending to be a cancer patient.

The 21-day cycle between infusions is just long enough to fuel this existential confusion about what is going on with me. There’s this slow, inevitable slide towards normalcy. The first week I am constantly reminded of being a sick person. Every day brings a new symptom. There’s heartburn day and nausea day and bone pain day. Sometimes I get an entirely new symptom and throw myself into researching it, only to have it resolve on its own in two to three days, just as I’ve resolved to try sticking rose geranium oil up my nose to treat my nasal vestibulitis. The second week, I start to feel like a regular person, albeit one with insomnia and inherited trauma tummy. The third week I feel fairly normal. Then I gotta ride the bad ride again.

It's wild how powerful the pull of normalcy is. You really can get used to almost anything. I’ve gotten used to the idea of having cancer, and now I only realize how inured I am when I tell someone new. Their reaction jolts me back into remembering that cancer is one of the top billed Bad Things that can happen in a person’s life. It’s universally legible to people, and yet there’s this gulf between how they imagine my experience and how it really is.

Which is not to say that the experience is great! But it does start to feel shockingly ordinary after a while. It reminds me of an excellent Elisa Gabbert essay about the psychology of nuclear accident survivorship, and the impossibility of constant fear (yes, I am aware this is a dramatic comparison. I am an Enneagram 4, and if you don’t like it, you can leave!). She quotes from Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer

I was struck by the indifference with which people talked about the disaster. In one dead village, we met an old man. He was living all alone. We asked him, “Aren’t you afraid?” And he answered, “Of what?” You can’t be afraid the whole time, a person can’t do that; some time goes by, and ordinary life starts up again.

Gabbert is struck by the Chernobyl people’s fondness for jokes. This makes sense to me.

So there’s the idea and the reality. The reality is dominated by coming home from the infusion center and falling asleep sitting up and then waking yourself up with these long, loud, otherworldly farts. I don’t know what to tell you. I guess cancer has less gravitas than I originally thought. Maybe everything is funny, because everything can happen to a person, and laughing is how you get power back over the big unthinkable things that happen to you.

Did I just reverse engineer the expression “laughter is the best medicine”? Or maybe even… “Live laugh love”? No. Maybe. Ok, actually, yes.