Episode 8 - A Day in the Life with Metastatic Breast Cancer

Ah, it is almost the New Year. Here’s hoping 2024 is a banner year for all of you! As for me, I am impatient for this year to end, and hope against hope January will provide me greater clarity, and a real time frame for what comes next in my treatment.

I doubt very much I am unusual here when I note it is the waiting, and uncertainty that is most difficult. I can handle damned near anything, once I know what’s coming. So! As I don’t yet, I’m focusing on what I do know, what I have learned, and hoping my experiences, and thoughts find a home here with you. I relate now one of the most potent, and for me, powerful realizations regarding my diagnosis.

Ok, I must admit, I am not always willing to see, and take delivery of the metaphysical. I tend toward rationalism, and anything that smacks of “woo woo,” makes me distinctly uncomfortable. My more spiritual friends know if they are to get through to me, they must clobber me soundly with a large, smelly fish. Yes, well. The universe, it would seem, feels the same way. Hello, breast cancer! I’m listening.

When I was first diagnosed, I was, of course, terrified, and dumb struck. Like a lot of us, I searched for what I had done to bring this down upon myself. Was it the low dose estrogen therapy I had in my early 50s? Was it because I let myself get fat in my early 60s? Or, utterly irrationally, was it because I had angered the gods in some way? And how was I to fight this thing, this invader, this threat to my life and happiness? In the early days, I thought of the cancer as coming from outside myself - that I’d contracted it like one would malaria, or Covid, or the Bubonic Plague, for crying out loud. As something I had allowed in from the outside world. It would take a definite “woo woo” moment to let me see it for what it actually is.

In August of 2022, I attended a three day yoga retreat with 12 other women. Yes, yes, we formed quite a tidy little coven that weekend. One of my dearest friends saw I was spinning, and flailing, and thought this might help, and made sure I was invited. It did help, though not in the way I think she thought it might. 

Our group, made up of women of a certain age, as the French like to say, were most serious about the actual practice of yoga, but more than willing to indulge in great silliness during our down times. Every evening red wine flowed freely, and dark chocolate seemed to materialize on every available surface. And the talk was good. Each and every woman there was accepting of one another, and eager to offer support. It was during one of these wine soaked evenings I was thunderstruck about my stupid cancer - it was NOT some vaguely communicable disease from outside my person, it was, as the police tell the poor babysitter in those slasher movies, “coming from inside the house!” Yeah. I finally saw this breast cancer for what it is - a riot, a chaos, a conflagration of errant cells wreaking havoc on me from inside my own body. And me, being me, immediately anthropomorphized the beastie.

With much wine in my yoga relaxed body, and in the company of a receptive audience, I told those lovely women what I was feeling, and how I could almost see the cancer as a person. I COULD see her, and feel her raging inside me. In my minds eye, I saw her as a Fury, spinning in circles, tearing at her hair, tearing at her clothes, biting herself, biting me. She seemed to me to be filled with unfocused violent anger, and fear, and was utterly, completely insane. And in that moment, all I wanted was to find a way to calm her, to comfort her, to lull her into sleep, so I might live. And that is how I think of my cancer now. A part of me that needs to be quieted, controlled, held in place so that it does not cause further harm. I cannot be rid of her, but I can do a lot to find ways to co-exist, as it were. So! As I wait till January to find out when, and if I’m going to have surgery to remove the original breast tumor, and what that all means, I am re-focusing on trying to calm myself. And the Fury that lives within me. 

I told this story recently to one of my more spiritual, and powerful friends, and she asked if I had named her, my Fury. As it happens, I have. Her name is Agnes. We make quite the pair. And so, that is my story for today!

Aggie and I look forward to many a fine adventure together in the New Year (as it seems we cannot be parted), and again wish you a wonderful 2024.

Thanks for listening.