Afraid.

Less than a month ago I was working, coming home, preparing dinners and chatting and running errands and being a mom, a wife, a friend. The business of those days was a dream of ongoing tasks that filled my days like background music. It was, to continue the metaphor, a refrain that the word "health" propelled, a momentum of its own buoyed by a returning trust in the world.

That's been shattered. There's no coda, only a wrenched needle ripped across a record, leaving those repeated clicks between ongoing, amplified silences. I'm sitting here and it's nearly midnight and my life, what it was, what it used to be --
click.....
click....
click.

I have cancer again. "Again." The implications of that word continue to frighten me. And the thread of optimism is still there, but it is fraying.

A New, Not Catholic Mass.

For three years now, it's happened near Easter.
The first year it was three days before. The initial diagnosis. The shock.
Year 2 was treatment recovery.
Now, year 3, more April news: a shadow. A mass near my rib. A Biblical vengeance, 5 cm worth. The size of an unborn baby's fist.

Something unnatural has arrived again in my body. Just when I was beginning to trust again in the world, turn back to my career, turn to saving and paying off some debt, turning to see my kid start high school --- this. Now this.

Everything has stopped. I am stopped. My thinking has stopped, my emotions, summer and vacation plans -- stopped. And I haven't told my family yet, haven't yet told my kid.

I am on hold until the biopsy. The biopsy will be difficult, it's in a difficult spot. Possibly inoperable. And until it's gone it's growing, growing, growing.

I am stopped but this thing -- I shall not yet name it -- is alive.

I Kissed Banana Pudding, and I Liked It.

I eat sugar. This has nothing to do with triple negative breast cancer, or maybe kind of, but I thought I'd put it out there that I do eat it, in moderation. That hoo-ha about "cancer feeding on sugar?"

Tobacco-in-a-spittoon pt-ting!

People with cancer are robbed of a whole world. We are robbed of safety, of comforts, of the ease of eating anything without worry. We are robbed of a sure future (and I know that's illusory, but health allows you to take tomorrow for granted) and we are robbed of time. With stage three triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), the risk for recurrence is higher than average.  Life's urgency increases and the recipe magazines - they call my name.

And so, one of the lifestyle changes I have made is to increase my intake of fruits and vegetables, as well as green tea. I have exercised my whole life. Reader, these do not make me special and cancer could come back anytime, even with these changes. I point these out to highlight that there's nothing unique about what I'm doing. Thousands of people make dietary and lifestyle changes every day; thousands of people get cancer, thousands go into remission. Ebb and flow. Ebb and flow.

Which brings me to banana pudding. I was salivating over old issues of Taste of Home magazine and found one with a recipe for banana pudding with - get this (eyebrows up and down, up and down) - Cool Whip, sweetened condensed milk, cream cheese, and SUGAR. Also, bananas. And vanilla extract. Gathering all my pastry mouth and lick-the-bowl anticipatory mojo, I baked and whipped up a glorious feast of cloudy sucrose, underscored with the yellow banana sweetness and capped with sweet cream. Dante Alighieri, you would not live here.

Bliss.

Thus, the point. Do not, in this short earthly measure, deprive yourself of pleasures. Hell has levels enough, and baldness makes no saints. Push off the tire swing and lift your feet; eat and savor and whirl at the bar, because you know, you know, after all the crazed spinning, you will always return to stillness, to the ground.

Cancer Didn't Make me a Better Person.

It didn't make me nicer.
It didn't make me suddenly brave.

And if you were to ask me if there were positive lessons, if the universe were sending me a message, I might:
a) Give the finger.
b) Laugh maniacally (cue plastic wind-up teeth).
c) Drive over a rodent quickly.

Which is to say that no, there are no messages. The positive lessons are mostly in your head.

Is this bad? Dear reader, the danger in this thinking is the implicit blame: if there is a message, then somehow you were "selected" to receive it. If there is a lesson, you must be The Student Who Hears. But these are fallacies: cancer is a random selector. It is secular, it is true science. Hear me: You are not special for having had it. This is not so terrible. For me, it was a relief.

And the last thing any patient wants is more health advice, more despair. Walk very gently before you pile any more "shoulds" on the cancer patient's list. She or he has had enough already.

Cancer didn't make me more spiritual. If anything, I'm a bit more petty, a bit more remembering. I look at swimsuit catalogues and envy two-breasted women. They are like birds to me now, elusive, robin red-breasted winged creatures, flitting from branch to branch in a world where it is always spring.

Cancer didn't make me kinder. But it did make me more real. Authentic. Mortality's door, one that before was in a room in my life's attic, is my front entrance now, and it is open and a strong wind is blowing. I walk through this door every day. It tells me not to hurry, but to hear.

And cancer never made me a warrior. It made me face choices and proceed. It made me ill, made the daylight dim, made me weep. These are not the stances of a soldier. They are the stances of suffering, and I do not wallow in them. But I will tell the truth.

What did cancer do for you? Did it change you?