For those of you who only started reading this blog recently, a temperature blanket is one you knit or crochet, one row per day for a year, with the color of each row determined by the high temperature for that day. I've got one going for 2017. You may scroll back in this blog, if you wish, and read more about it in an earlier post.
So I recently put in some marathon sessions and got myself caught up.
Summer in Dayton in the temperature blanket.
An unusually cool summer.
It became an occasion for reflection. I remember when I started the project thinking, "Wow, what a fun idea, but this is just a nothing year. It's not anyone's birth year or wedding year or retirement year or any other significant milestone. Why memorialize such an ordinary year with a temperature blanket?"
Ha. Little did I know. It has turned out, of course, to be anything but an ordinary year. It is the year that cancer entered my life.
I say it that way deliberately: "the year that cancer entered my life," not "the year I got cancer" or "the year I had cancer." I'm no stranger to major medical episodes, but up to now they have been just that: episodes. This is different. It's not an episode, like one of my two knee replacements, that will one day be over and done with.
This is more like a permanent strand of my identity. Certainly not my whole identity, but a permanent strand of it. Yes, there is an acute phase, which I am very much in the midst of right now, but even when the acute phase is past, this cancer strand will be with me permanently, changing who I am and how I live. I don't think of myself as a "knee replacement person," but I do already, and suspect I always will, think of myself as a "breast cancer person."
Part of that sense comes from the nature of the treatment plan. It stretches out for nearly six years of active treatment, with ongoing monitoring after that forever.
Part of it comes from the remarkable sense I have of having been inducted into a particular community by virtue of this diagnosis. Breast cancer, after all, is largely (not entirely!) a women's disease, and women tend to be the community builders, the tenders of connections, the caregivers. I have been showered with support from people I know, people I barely know, and people I don't know at all. Some has been quite practical: a small pillow to cushion the seat belt in the car, from someone I don't know at all. Emotional support from friends and loved ones has included cards, flowers, and home baked cookies. Spiritual support, in the form of prayers, prayer books, and spiritual tokens of various kinds has come both from loved ones and from other breast cancer people who passed on to me those items from which they themselves had drawn strength. Others have shared music they found healing and consoling.
Yes, friends and family have been wonderfully supportive in my previous major medical adventures, and part of this is just the same--the good people I am blessed with in my life being good to me. But there is something additional this time: a sense of induction into a new identity, a new community, of shared suffering, support, and purpose. I am now the recipient of people "paying it forward," and the call seems clear: accept this now, and when your turn comes, pay it forward.
I don't know if I am really capturing in these words what I'm experiencing. All I can say is, it feels different from previous times. I can only repeat what I said above: it feels like I am being inducted into a new identity, which comes with both a new community and a new mission.
UPDATE:
Met with the surgeon this morning. I am healing well. It turns out she actually removed five lymph nodes, all of which were cancer free, and there were good clear margins all around. So she got it all out. For those who like hard data, the pathology report concludes that what I had was invasive ductal carcinoma, Stage II a, Grade 2. The tumor was 2.5 cm, which bumps it up to just over the line from Stage I (less than 2 cm) to Stage II (2-5 cm). I will go back for another checkup with the surgeon in four weeks, and she anticipates that the chemo will begin right after that--unless the oncologist says otherwise when I meet with him next Wednesday.
Rapunzel, awaiting her moment.
The woman who helped me with choosing the wig was remarkably kind and gentle.
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