Cancer Chronicles, part 3

It's funny to think about how cancer is affecting you when you find out you have cancer but haven't started any treatment. Like I think about talking to doctors last month and they explained the treatment and I thought "what a relief! this is nothing at all!" But then you go through the process and it totally turns your life upside down.

Anyway...I am doing pretty great. I had surgery (almost) three weeks ago and feel great, besides being very, very tired. All of the time. And having to literally say to myself before doing things like going to the grocery store "Rachel, you can do hard things." I no longer have any desire to cook or honestly do much of anything besides sit on my couch eating popsicles. It is odd that having scheduled my radioactive iodine treatment makes me anxious, because that means "cancer" will officially be over in a month, but I am afraid that I won't feel any better in any area of my life, and I will no longer have an excuse. But for the time being, I feel semi-justified in just wanting to be lazy, and everyone else does, too. I just dread that not so distant day when people expect me to contribute to society.

On Monday I went to my office for the first time in almost a month. Bless telework. I hadn't really talked to my co-worker much yet, so she came to my desk and I was telling her about my surgery, and literally 2 minutes later this woman very passive aggressively moved desks (because of our new open workspace), and then a few minutes after that she came over and got mad at me specifically for being too loud and told me to go somewhere else. There were visibly a dozen other people in our small radius talking as well (it was lunch time), but whatever, I went home.

Also, best/worst of all, one week before I had surgery, I realized I had bed bugs. This meant I came back from Idaho on a Tuesday afternoon and went straight to the laundry room to start washing every item I own on hot water before drying and bagging them. Then I put everything in my car, moved everything else out of my room, and basically worked on bed bug prep until 1 a.m. Thursday night. Then four hours later I woke up and went to the hospital. Oh yes, I had also thrown away my bed and my friend was going to deliver my new bed while I was in the hospital (as the exterminator was supposed to come while I was in the hospital, too). Please note that my mom arrived in the midst of this and was, as always, a rock star.

Well, post-surgery I am rolled into my hospital room and the first thing I hear is that the exterminator got into a car accident and our house wouldn't be treated until the following week. Meaning I had no bed, and I would have to leave the house for 8 hours during one of my sick days, and I was not exactly mobile. Panic ensued, but luckily I had a LOT of visitors at the hospital who were in my room during my litany of frantic phone calls, and they solved all of my problems. My friend MJ had been storing her bed at my house, so she moved it into my living room while I was in the hospital so I could sleep there. And my friend Paul offered to hang with me at his house all day Monday while the exterminator was there, and it was my most fun day yet. My friend Lance even offered me a free hotel room for my entire recovery, but I decided I just wanted to be home. So in the end, things work out because even when life is overwhelmingly bad, I am still surrounded by wonderful, kind, giving, supportive people. Like those of you willing to read this blog.

I become radioactive in three weeks. I am not allowed to take anything with me to the hospital that I don't want to throw away when I leave. It sounds like two days of prison, but this will also be a blessing as it will subtly encourage me to avoid a life of crime.