5 Years
It’s been a while.
Today marks 5 years since I officially received my cancer diagnosis. It’s not exactly an anniversary I’m celebrating, but it feels like some recognition is due.
Being a cancer survivor at 39 is a weird thing. I constantly feel like I’m trapped between being a twenty-something who has barely learned to adult and having so much perspective that my peers can’t fully understand. While I’ve been recovering physically and emotionally, my friends have hit important milestones in their lives, some of which I won’t have a chance at. I identify a lot more with broke 25-year-olds until I try to hang with them for a night and poop out around 9:00.
I’ve been meaning to pass along updates and wisdom for a long time, but I could never seem to sit down and write. I think I needed time to not talk about cancer. Not that I really stopped in person, but you can’t really heal mentally if you keep yourself too immersed in something.
I started therapy several months ago, and while my cancer wasn’t a major topic of conversation, I realized a lot about how I handled having cancer in therapy. The biggest lesson was figuring out why I get more emotional talking about it now than I did while I was in the thick of it, and it really comes down to kind of a delayed trauma reaction.
The whole time I was in treatment and getting blood transfusions with a side of chemo, I was essentially in survival mode, and I kind of shut down my emotions. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but it was what I needed to do to make it through all the shit without losing my mind. If I’d felt all my feelings at the time, I’d have been a sobbing mess and filled with dread and stress every single day.
The funny thing is that you can’t just sit down and decide it’s been long enough, and now I can sit down and feel my feelings for a few hours and I’ll be totally fine and move on. That is not how it works. It would have been a lot easier if I could have just set aside a day to recover, but alas. What happens, at least for me, is that I’ll be totally fine talking about cancer or what it was like, and then hear a song or watch a sad scene in a movie and sob. Or an animal I know only from the internet will die and I will just be inconsolable. Other times, I think about how scared my parents must have been and get choked up out of nowhere. Some of the random waterworks most definitely have to do with menopause and hormones, but depression and anxiety surrounding a very traumatic life event are not to be trifled with.
Delayed onset PTSD can also be triggered by other stressful life events, so I guess the Trump Presidency, Covid-19, losing a job, social isolation for 2 years, a stressful work environment, and losing that job suddenly could contribute to a trauma response popping up. Your body also holds on to trauma and triggers can cause stress hormones to flare up, oh say…when you have to go to a doctor every 3-6 months to the same office where you endured a lot of the trauma and desperately try not to have a panic attack.
What others perceive as being “so strong” is likely to be a state of numbness brought on by psychological trauma.
Talking about cancer has gotten a lot easier in general, as long as it’s in a setting where I can revert to dark humor as my coping mechanism of choice when it gets too hard, and as long as it doesn’t get too personal. Asking me to dig into those feelings will make me choke up.
Physically, I’m not sure I’ll ever be healed. I spent the better part of two years trying to get to the bottom of gastroenterological questions, and the best I could get was an IBS diagnosis…which is a nice way of saying “I have no idea what’s wrong with you since nothing seems to trigger this consistently.” It’s hard to tell if I have gotten better or if I’ve been able to work from home so much I haven’t had to be far from a bathroom. I think I’ve gotten better at managing it.
I’m beginning to think the fatigue just doesn’t go away. I have good days and bad days, and I’m learning my ADHD may have something to do with it, as fatigue is a common side effect. The brain uses 20% of the body’s energy on a daily basis. Your brain has a limited amount of energy dedicated to staying focused or disciplined. Imagine if your brain ran like someone put a brick on the gas pedal—you burn through that focus fuel really damn fast some days. I can physically feel the impact of a day where I’ve had to extrovert more than usual or my brain had to stay focused for extended periods.
Digestive systems take up another 5-15% of normal energy expenditures. IBS is also known to cause fatigue. This can be because of poor nutrient absorption, leading to anemia, and a connection between anxiety and IBS. IBS can also cause poor sleep.
I guess I’m destined to be exhausted, but I’m still here.
