Cancer is an emotional roller coaster.
There are days where it's not so hard. You're feeling a little better than usual and you have a little more energy to get up and see your friends or just watch some TV and not feel really sick while doing it.
Then there are bad days where everything hurts and you don't know how to describe what you're feeling but you just don't feel good and you're angry and a little sad and you feel like everything is going to be terrible forever.
I remember one day when I thought I was getting the last of my chemotherapy treatments. It felt like a good day--like I was finally going to be done with all of it. Then everything changed in just a moment and my doctor told me there would be more and that I needed to start considering getting radiation as well.
I thought I was done. I thought I was almost done, at least. And doctors always have that "why do you look so upset at this news" face on like you should have known that it wasn't over yet. You should have known that you couldn't possibly deserve to be done.
I will never be able to fully explain what it feels like to have to drag your easily-car-sick-self to a hospital that's twenty minutes away to force yourself to sit in a chair for seven hours on end with a needle in your am that's pumping chemicals into you that make you feel like absolute shit. But when you're sitting there thinking that that is going to be the end of it and you get the bad news it's like your world is ending all over again. I would say it's like taking candy from a baby-- easy to do for the doctor and mean to the baby but it felt like I was a baby who had just had everything it ever liked taken away from it---and it seemed pretty easy for the doctor to do.
And chemotherapy isn't just like a class you can skip because you have three unexcused absence days. You don't really get to say "I don't feel good enough to go" or "I just don't feel like it today." I don't get to be scared about just a bad grade. I have to be scared about the size of the mass above my heart and how sick I will feel and how much longer I won't have any hair and what I'll have to worry about with radiation and what cancers I could get from that and school coming up and how many more treatments there are left and OH GOD that means I have to see that social worker more.
The last day of my treatment was on Halloween of 2014. I don't remember being very happy about it...I remember just wanting it to be over with and by the end of it I left feeling pretty indifferent about it. In fact, I think I may have snapped at my dad about something because I was in a pretty bad place feeling like it wasn't even over yet. Like I knew it would never feel over.
When radiation treatments are finally over the assistants expect you to ring a bell they have in the hallway as a celebration. Freedom, celebration, it's over! --- or something like that. Except just like with the end of chemo I didn't feel great about it. I grabbed the rope and hit it against the side once and it was lame. I can't think of a better word. It was lame and thinking about it now I kind of regret not just going ham on it. I just sort of rang it once and walked out and didn't look back.
Cancer is an emotional roller coaster that sometimes stops in the middle because of technical difficulties.
You get to sit there without an explanation as to why it's not on its way up anymore.
Just like Disneyland...or I guess LizzyLand or whatever (see this didn't have to be all that dark that's funny haaaa)...but there aren't any employees to tell you anyways so you're sort of just hoping that it'll start back up again sometime soon.
And then sometimes there is no roller coaster at all because you just remember it like a bad dream now that you didn't get to wake up from until recently.
You tell yourself that nightmares are silly and that they aren't real...
And maybe, if you try and go back to sleep, you'll have a better dream this time.
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