Mortality, Part II

Although I’ve always lived with an uncomfortable awareness of my own mortality, my cancer diagnosis brought it careening into the foreground for awhile there. I’m feeling pretty good these days about my prospects for surviving, but in the early weeks I thought I was a goner.

One of my blog readers wrote to tell me that she had survived cancer, and the part I was going through was undoubtedly the most difficult part of the journey. She assured me it would get easier. I clung to that, and she was right. I’m still closer to the beginning than the end of this journey, but it’s already much easier than it was in the early days.

In the beginning, I had to deal with the sheer enormity of having cancer. The word ‘cancer’ carries so much emotional weight, and the diagnosis felt like a death sentence. I don’t know why I have such a visceral reaction to cancer. I don’t have it with heart disease, which is probably just as likely to kill me.

Remember that episode of The Twilight Zone, where the guy suffers through the extraordinary pain of having an earwig eat its way through his brain, and then finally the earwig emerges from the other ear and he thinks he’s survived the ordeal? And then the doctor says “I’m very sorry to have to tell you that the earwig was a pregnant female and she laid eggs all through your brain.”

Finding out I had cancer was like that. Shocking. Horrifying. Surreal. It took me a few days to even say the word without crying.

While I was dealing with the shock I also had to deal with many unknowns as I underwent all the imaging tests that would define what cancer meant in my case. The tests themselves are nothing; it’s the waiting that’s painful. It didn’t help that some of the tests had to be repeated because of suspicious results. As I awaited those crucial test results, my imagination compulsively explored the possibilities, like a tongue exploring the hole where a tooth used to be. I had fantasies about my own funeral.

Meanwhile, every ache and pain felt somehow connected to the cancer. A headache was a brain tumour. A backache meant the cancer had spread to my bones. I visualized it spreading, growing, claiming territory, taking over my body.

At the same time, I was trying to educate myself without freaking myself out even further. It’s amazing how little I actually knew about cancer before I found out I had it. I saw it as a sinister invader, a black menace, an insatiable, malevolent, malignant thing.

Now that I’ve lived with it for awhile and read a fair amount about it, I no longer see cancer as sinister or even as an invader. It’s just part of me. It’s just my cells, with a defect that allows them to keep dividing when they shouldn’t be. It’s just life, trying to achieve immortality. Learning about it was instrumental in coming to terms with it. I think I was just starting to get to that point when I wrote Warts, Wars ad the Language of Cancer. That was twelve days after I received the diagnosis.

I had intended for today’s post to be about locking eyes with my own mortality, and how that changed my life. However, there was a lot more prelude than I expected, and the prelude ate up all the space. Tune in tomorrow, when I will finally reveal the meaning of life. 😉