The truth is....I have been lost.
Before cancer, I would post pictures of my culinary creations on Facebook: lasagna, spaghetti, chicken and dumplins, cherry cheesecake. Those photos symbolized an ostensible sense of normalcy to me because, before cancer, I loved to cook and had a little problem with buying too much kitchen stuff. Some people have an addiction to shoes, clothes, and purses. Not me. My addiction is with crock-pots (I have five), dishes (6 sets), and anything for my kitchen. The best present I ever received was my pot and pan set from my husband. It has been six months since my diagnosis and I have had no drive or desire to cook. The neuropathy and the rib pain make cooking annoying and even painful. But more critically, I had lost all pleasure in food, convinced against all rationality that everything I ate would make the cancer spread. During this hospital stay, I have not had much of an appetite at all and have practically thrown up everything I have eaten anyway. I actually long for a home cooked dinner.
The truth is, cancer or not, life moves forward and demands that we take charge or be dragged along. And now, I just have to face a new kind of normal and discover what is comfortable for me. I am trying to answer life's calls to a new kind of normalcy but there is always a set back. I hate cancer.
I have been broken emotionally, more broken than I can ever remember being. Often times, teaching the kids, being able to cook a new recipe, folding laundry...all the ostensibly life affirming acts of normalcy, felt like me clinging to a piece of wood in the vast ocean...acts of grave desperation that would only put off, for a time, the unavoidable truth and great inevitability. The truth being that I have cancer and inevitability being that I would eventually die from that cancer. No doubt that my mind and my spirit has been traumatized by all of the hospitalizations, the number of terminal illnesses I have been diagnosed with since my thoracotomy. I have often times come to the conclusion that I just want to give up...but I do know that is not an option for me. The weight of the last six months and all I have seen and experienced and the knowledge that the road ahead, a metaphor for my uncertain future, is fraught with more bumps and setbacks. When I was first diagnosed, I may have been shell shocked and felt like I'd been run over by a truck, but I was like a marathon runner at the starting line, nervous but full of energy from last night's carb load and the pounding adrenaline brought by the screams of the crowd. I was untested by this disease; I could spew all the war rhetoric about fighting and beating the odds; I could believe the positive spin that the doctors were so adroit at casting on my situation. Six months later, I am dazed with fatigue and pain, uncertain of how much of the race I have actually run and how much further I would have to go, having lost sight of the finish line and all the optimism I once had. I have felt crippling physical pain, the kind of pain that made me want to die. I have cried uncontrollably more times than I can count. I have watched others, new friends and old, endure recurrences and surgeries, search desperately for clinical trials and make difficult decisions about stopping treatment, and I always wonder if I am headed down the same grueling path.
As trying as the thoractomy and the constant in and out of the hospitals have been, it is the daily grind of living with cancer that is just as debilitating, if not more so. That grind makes my war against cancer and pulmonary fibrosis feel like a war of attrition, fought in the subtle but deadly trenches of the human psyche. The process of putting one foot in front of the other, the very attempt to act sane and live a "normal" life...has left me exhausted, alone, bitter, and angry. When people know of my diagnosis, or they see me with my oxygen on (which I have 24/7 and the stares of the public are quite annoying), especially questions from people who really do not care about the answer and are so happily ensconsed in the unblemished perfections of their own lives, or if they do care, and are afraid to pry; "Oh, fine. Just hanging in there," I say vaguely. When I really want to scream at all of them, "This is so FUCKING unfair! I DIDN'T DESERVE ANY OF THIS! MY CHILDREN DIDN'T DESERVE THIS!" But of course I keep these and millions of other bitter, angry, and unkind thoughts to myself. I don't break social decorum and I keep my fake smiles firmly plastered on my face (instead, I just break social decorum by writing all of this here).
Unconsciously, I use the thought to form a wall around myself, a wall with which to keep the person I love the most in this world out...my poor, beleaguered, hurt, exhausted, terrified Kevin. I lash out at him in anger; I push him away; I don't tell him what's really on my mind; the thoughts are too involved, too depressing, too sad, too imbued with guilt. I feel guilty for marrying Kevin and ruining his life. I was the last girl anyone from his family expected for him to marry. I was the girl with two children already. But, if I hadn't met Kevin, I would never have had the last piece of my puzzle...my Tristan. And I love him deeply for that...and all of the many other things he has done to enhance my life. The guilt I feel is not rational...
Kevin is angry too. Angrier than I. He lashes out at me too even though his anger is directed at the gross injustice at all of this, at the unseen forces that shape our lives. Why is this happening...he wants to know. He feels an irrational guilt too. He thinks he should have done something different, something to save me, that he should have somehow known that this was all happening to me. The guilt eats at him like a parasite. He goes about his, almost as if everything is normal. What's hard for him are the memories of our life before cancer. Those innocent days when our lives were carefree and happy. But, like me, what's hardest of all is to operate under the strain of trying to be normal.
Like me, Kevin uses his bitter, angry and unkind thoughts to build a wall around himself to keep me away. Consequently, we are both left feeling so very alone in this journey, not only vis-a-vis the rest of the world (for certainly the people we interact with on a daily basis have no inkling of what our lives are like), but even vis-a-vis one another. I don't know exactly what he thinks in his isolation, but in mine, not only am I convinced that everyone in the world has abandoned me in the business of their own lives, given up on me as a lost cause, but also that my life partner, the one person who should never leave me, will, ushered along by regret in having ever met me, eager to move on with a life without me.
The fundamental belief that underlay all my thoughts, that ran through this deepest depressive state that I've known is that I will die from this disease, perhaps not this year or the year after, but eventually. Even though my husband refuses to believe this, I know what my prognosis is. In the midst of a fight with Kevin, I would say things like, "What's the point? I'm going to die from this anyhow." When he could escape his own anger at me for saying what I said (a very righteous anger), Kevin would sometimes come after me saying, "Are you giving up? I'm not going to let you give up, dammit!" But, none of his words penetrated the wall I had erected around myself. So, I would lie in my bed crying in the darkness.
I thought for a time that such a conviction was merely a coping mechanism, an attempt at managing expectations and disappointment, a mental trick by which to get myself to live more completely in the present. But then I started to realize that it stemmed from something more troubling and destructive- a loss of faith in myself and God that I couldn't seem to rebuild after six months of battling cancer and PF, most recently, after battling sepsis (currently in the hospital being treated for).
Without the faith and self-confidence in my own strength, in the very person I was always known to be, I was lost.
Love you all and truly mean it and God loves you too,
Shanna xoxoxo
LUNGevity National Hope Summit: I'm participating in an event to raise money to fight lung cancer—and I need your help!
I'm planning to attend LUNGevity Foundation's National HOPE Summit in Washington, DC, in May - it's a special conference just for lung cancer survivors like me. If I can raise $1000 or more in donations, LUNGevity will cover my travel expenses, including US round-trip transportation and hotel accommodations.
Proceeds from this fundraiser will benefit LUNGevity Foundation, the leading private provider of research funding for lung cancer. LUNGevity Foundation is firmly committed to making an immediate impact on increasing quality of life and survivorship of people with lung cancer by accelerating research into early detection and more effective treatments, as well as providing community, support, and education for all those affected by the disease.
Please join me in my efforts to stop lung cancer—the leading cancer killer—now!
Official prayer warrior page for my fight against lung cancer: facebook.com/hope4shanna
Official blog Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/shannabananahealthandfitness
My Go Fund Me Page (any and all donations will help with my medical funds) gofundme.com/hope4shanna2016
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