C like cat.

As I made my appt with my medical oncologist last week, the scheduler on the phone gave me directions to Emory’s Winship Cancer Center, my close by radiation site. I couldn’t hear her well as she said the name of the place, so she reminded me it’s “C,” like cat. How nice that she shares my not benign way of talking! And how interesting that all of a sudden, I can say things like my medical oncologist, my radiation oncologist, when just a few short weeks ago I didn’t have any of these people in my world. But I don’t believe it feels quite the same as if you could say my pool guy, or my tailor, or some similar luxury person one might afford and for affectation sake feel inclined to refer to. I’m not showing off, really, but I can say I have my team, which of course includes me, and I’m confident we will all be taking excellent care of me.

So many refer to this path or journey I’m on, but I need to look at it differently. Imagine your fridge is packed to the gills and one day you discover there’s a moldy lemon way in back. You remove the lemon of course and notice it has released and left some juice and pulp and mold behind, clouding up your glass shelves. Now everything in the fridge must come out and you wipe down the entire fridge with hot soapy water, removing the shelves, the drawers, the butter dish and the door compartments. Next you assess all your fridge contents and decide what to keep and what to toss. Finally, you get a strong bleach cleaner and do a final wipe of the entire fridge, inside and out before putting back the contents. My little not benign mass was that lemon (of course way smaller) and I’m now getting ready for the bleach cleaner treatment.

If I were to call this my path or my journey, which we all know it is, it would feel like mine and mine alone. Referring to it that way, for me, makes me feel separate and I’ll admit a tad lonely, because it sounds more like I’m moving down some road, leaving all familiarity and friends who have stayed behind on land to continue doing their normal things, without some path switching up their plans. I picture Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away taking his beloved Wilson along on his homemade boat as he set out on the big blue sea watching familiar land in the distance get smaller and smaller. I don’t want to be on that boat leaving what I know. Nor do I think I have to.

Instead this experience from Oct to date for me is rather a timeline. You remember the history timelines from grade school? Where there is a horizontal line and big round bullets popping up along the way, and vertical lines extending up and down from them with notable events and their dates? I’m on this timeline, having moved through a slew of significant dates already. I’ve got more ahead, but at some point, you get to the end of the timeline and no, I’m not talking about your own demise, but the end of the events which have made up this moment in your history. Later, you can step back and look at all you moved through and remember all the waiting between bullet points, wishing the next one would hurry and happen already, and how all the wishing in the world didn’t change the rate at which you reached the next bullet point.

I’m in that waiting mode now. Waiting on the Oncotype test results from the tissue they removed during my lumpectomy which will indicate how likely this strain of not benigns is to return. There is some numerical risk value this result will bring and I understand scoring 26 or higher means a greater risk for which they bring out the major artillery. I should hear next week and this value will chart the course of my treatment, tell me whether on top of radiation I also will need chemo. Not even sure the order I’d get them in either, if in fact I do need both. I’ve thrown a ridiculous amount of anxiety at this possibility and worried myself into tears, an unlimited stream that easily comes out of nowhere and which I’ve let run its long and winding course each time, leaving my eyes puffy and watery.

I’ve decided to hold on to a few positives, however: my dreams over the years have been quite telling. As horrible as this may sound, the night before my mom died I dreamed that she died. And what do you know, the next day she did. I had dreamed this dream once before earlier in her emphysema illness, but this second one I guess took. Certainly not my doing, but I found it interesting that it popped up in my dreams just the night before. All this said, the other night I dreamed I got my results and I only needed radiation, and the strain of radiation recommended would be super easy and manageable, and before you know it, I’d be cruising toward the end of this timeline, ready to daily pop that estrogen blocker pill I’m to go on for five years. I woke up in a hopeful mood, with less puffy eyes, and my outlook was energetic and largely normal. As if that weren’t enough to boost me, the next day I found a penny on the ground, heads up, which if you’re even mildly superstitious you might know is good luck.

My results will be my results. I will do what the doctors recommend, because while medicine fascinates me, biology is the only class I’ve ever failed, and so I’m not going to even begin to know any better or second guess these doctors. That poor biology grade was pure laziness on my part as I refused to memorize all the parts and pieces of these amazing bodies of ours, refused to put in the enormous hours required. Whatever course of treatment I am prescribed, I will keep moving through my timeline, and continue to move forward, checking all these things off my list. Of course, I would love this treatment to be easy and not make me feel or look bad, but in the end, I’ve got that gleaming refrigerator waiting for me at the finish line, and c’mon, who doesn’t love a cleaned out fridge?