Grief again

So lately I just seem to wake up crying.

It happened a few days ago, and again this morning, after one bout of being up. I managed fall asleep a second time, which doesn't always work, but the had an extremely odd dream.

I'm really grieving. This last round of no cancer/cancer feels like whiplash, and also has given me a real emotional smackdown. We had ten days. Ten days where we were told, and we got to hope, that I would be cancer free (or at least between treatments, and No Evidence of Disease). Then brain metastasis number two popped up.

And I wonder. Is this the new pattern? After the first round of breast cancer, and all the nasty treatment, I went on tamoxifen, and went three years almost to the day before a rediagnosis. That bumped me up to Stage 4, and metastatic breast cancer. Meaning we can treat it, but the odds of it going away all the way are slim.

I did chemotherapy again, and went another 9 months, and then the third round - and the cancer had travelled from chest, breast and lymph system over the blood brain barrier, and we faced up to brain mets and gamma knife surgery. I also repeated chemo for the third time, to treat cancerous lymph nodes in my shoulder, chest and along the trachea.

Since that surgery and chemo, chest appears to be stable, but the second bratty little brain squid reared it's little pointy head - approximately eight months after the first. HOWEVER - it appears to have popped up visibly on the MRIs in the space of about 6-8 weeks. Slowly, creepingy, it speeds up. It sneaks in, and takes over. Sooner or later, I stop hoping for a break, and start imagining continuous chemotherapy, more rounds of gamma knife, being on the steroid for the rest of my life...

Dearly beloved, I'm TIRED. And grieving. I'm grieving for my family, who never get to have NORMAL. They have me wired on steroids and irritable, exhausted from treatments and too many doctor's appointments, worrying about money all the time...

Denial, grief, anger, bargaining, acceptance. It's not once, but over and over that you recycle these emotions. I feel as though all my fuses are blown. The only two that are operative right now are grief and anger. I cry in the car. I cry in the shower. I cry over silly dramas that people create around me, and hurt feelings, and feeling misunderstood.

And I cry about letting go.

I don't think I get to see Tess dance the Nutcracker 10 years from now.

Most of the time, I am an optimist, a fighter, a person who is taking this on as a chronic disease. Who will handle the treatments they throw at me, try new stuff, do clinical trials, inject hamster proteins into my veins to fight this disease. But at best it's a stalemate. I no longer believe I can win.

And at what point is enough enough? Do I say, I can't take this any more, please let me stop? No more treatment. No more radiation, no more chemo. Now I just get to be comfortable, and enjoy the time I have left. It's not now. It's probably not soon. But it's coming.


I see the question that no one ever asks in their eyes. They ask about the prognosis, the treatment, the timing. What they really want to ask is, how soon are you going to die? Do you know? But no one asks, it's way too socially incorrect.

No, I don't. I know the stats. I know the pattern. Nobody knows when they are going to die, your doctor doesn't know when HE is going to die. But the part I know that most people don't, is that with metastatic breast cancer, there's a choice. Most women do not exhaust all the options they have for treatment. With ovarian cancer, if it comes back, it's usually as refractory disease - in english that's cancer that does not respond to most or any chemotherapy. Breast cancer has dozens, and it is generally considered "responsive". But women..just run out of steam. Choose to stop treatment. And having seen two people through it, I know what happens next.

So it's possible that I have a much clearer idea of when and how I might die than most people.

And it is making me cry.