I think meta-cognition just means realising what my subconscious was trying to tell me all along. I've been busy with school holidays and then term starting again, and my car broke down again, and... well, then I realised something else. I started this blog to process my cancer journey, and what I have written so far mirrors what I was doing at this time last year. Which was not much. At this time last year, I had reached a fairly dark place - so the pause in my writing this year reflects my reluctance to write about what was happening then.
Buckle up, you have been warned. This is a cancer story, yes. It is not a nice, happy, wrapped in a pink ribbon "cancer has made me stronger and I wouldn't change a thing" story. No, this is not a story of a "survivor" who has it all together, or even a "warrior" who is fighting the good fight. This is just me, stumbling through the dark. There isn't much that is pink in this story, though there's quite a bit of red and some black.
So, to resume the story, I mustered up enough courage to turn up for my third round of chemotherapy, even knowing how I would feel afterward. I held my arm still and let them put that damn big needle in my vein and pump in the poison. I reminded myself that this was the third out of four rounds of my first chemotherapy protocol, then I would be half way though! After that I had another four rounds of a new kind of chemotherapy - but I would read about that when I got there.
The week after chemo I spent on the couch, tired and sick. Chocolate helped a bit.
(As Victor Hugo would say: let me digress. I had always thought chemotherapy patients lost weight. Nope. I gained 6kg during my course of chemo. The nurse tried to reassure me that it was a steroid side effect. I told her it was chocolate side effect. So I was fat, as well as bald, tired and sick. Do you wonder why I don't want to revisit that time?)
Anyway, third chemo done and dusted - just one more until the half way point and then I would be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel!
Except that this was the moment my cancer decided to throw me a curve ball. My blood tests had always been good - I never had neutropenia and the risk of infection that some cancer patients get. So I viewed it as pretty much routine to have blood tests and a physical examination before each chemo session. I wandered into my oncologist's office, peeked at my test results on the edge of her desk, everything as usual. She examined the lump (I never touched it myself - I had never liked the idea of not taking the cancer out immediately) then she cancelled my chemotherapy.
What? Why? I'm nearly half-way! I don't want to take a break! I've worked it all out, and if I go straight through I'll finish in time to have my surgery just before Christmas and then recover over the summer. I have my life all planned out already!
Except that the best laid plans can be completely trashed by cancer when it decides not to co-operate. My cancer was not responding to the chemotherapy. Not at all. It was actually continuing to grow on the current regimen. I tried not to be disturbed by the idea of my cancer still growing inside my body, living on my blood, stealing my nutrients, and trying to steal my life. I tried not to be creeped-out by my own body and the menace lurking inside me. It worked about as well as you might expect, which was not at all.
My oncologist was urgently changing my treatment plan - bin the current plan, it's not working and is therefore a waste of precious time. New plan, new chemotherapy agent - and a new schedule of six rounds of this one, assuming I can cope with the side effects which are generally known to be worse than the other one, and are possibly permanent.
For the first time I started to wonder about the survival statistics I had been reading and whether I would end up on the "good" side. For me at Stage 3 (large primary, known lymph node involvement) the numbers say that 72% of us will still be alive in five years. That sounded kind of OK to me at first, it's nearly three-quarters, right? Except that's only for Stage 3A. If I turned out at surgery to be Stage 3C the 5 year survival drops to 49% - a coin toss.
I'll put you out of your suspense. I would not know this for another five months, but I was going to get that Stage 3C classification before it was all finished. I was found at surgery to have more extensive lymph node involvement than was evident on the ultrasound.
So that's the news to about October 2013, and now you know why I haven't wanted to write it out. Somehow seeing the numbers in black and white makes it look more inevitable. That probably shows I am better at optimism than mathematics...
