Moving On

Radiation is over (a week and a half ago)--no more daily treks to the cancer center. My skin seems to me to be healing up remarkably quickly from the radiation burns.  I don't know, maybe everybody's skin heals quickly, but this has been faster than I expected, and I'm grateful for that. This afternoon I will attend the first session of a six week long oncology exercise program, both to start getting back in shape and to learn how to exercise safely in light of my (lifelong) lymphedema risk.  After that, and maybe concurrently for cardio only, I will resume my workouts at the exercise center I've been going to for the last three years. I'm now three days into taking my daily hormone blocking pill, a regimen I will follow for five years. And by the end of this month I will be halfway through my year of herceptin infusions.

So the intensive phase of my cancer treatment is over, and I'm switching into (and learning) the long-term phase. It's a new chapter.

Interestingly, I have observed in myself something akin to the nesting instinct said to arise in pregnant women in the last couple of months before birth.  A compelling impulse to re-do my space here at home has welled up in me.  So I started by trashing or giving away cancer equipment or supplies I no longer need, clearing away the set-up I had created in the bathroom for preparing the saltwater soaks, and moving what little equipment I do still need to less prominent, less visible places.  But it has gone further than that.  I have experienced an intense drive to declutter my spaces in general, to rearrange and refresh them.  Some of the changes have been subtle, likely not obvious to the casual observer, like replacing houseplants that had become scraggly.  Still, these subtle changes have been significant to me.

Others have been more obvious.  Last Sunday, for example (it's Tuesday as I write), I shoved furniture around and rearranged the living room, which also entailed some minor rearrangements to two other rooms as furniture from the living room found new homes.  The central goal was to move my favorite chair from the coldest, darkest corner of the house, where it has sat for years because it was part of a visually pleasing arrangement of conversational groupings, to a spot at the opposite end of the room where it is tucked into a bay window, with a view outside to bird feeders, garden, and sky, with light flooding in over my shoulder.

Yes, that end of the room now looks more crowded, but something in me is no longer interested in how my room looks to the hypothetical (nonexistent) House and Garden photographer and insists instead on how it feels for me to live in.

I'd say that, coming more from my gut than my head, I am starting to engage with the process of redefining myself, no longer as cancer patient but rather as cancer survivor.  No, more accurately as someone with a history of cancer and its treatment--i.e., person first, history of cancer secondary.

I'm still in process, probably will be for a goodly time.  But it feels good.

The coldest, darkest corner of the room,

where my comfy chair sat for years.

My comfy chair in its new warm, 

well-lit spot, where the birds sing to me.