Cancer Ever After

My last post was a little more controversial than I realized. I was asked pretty directly if I thought it was fair to compare infertility to cancer.  For me, yes.  Infertility shaped how I experience and deal with cancer.  Yet, I also know that my journey with cancer is not everyone’s.  My prognosis is positive – this isn’t the case for everyone.  My treatment doesn’t involve hospital stays or blood transfusions – that is the norm for many.  It will take me about 8 months total to beat this, some people fight for years. Others have metastatic cancer or untreatable cancers that fight daily, just for the right to live another day.

I don’t believe our fights are the same at all.  I do think that infertility has made this battle easier for me than it would have been if it was the first major obstacle in my life.  I used to pass out every time blood was taken.  They stop taking the vials if you do this, which made this an obstacle to building my family. This was unacceptable, so I overcame this fear. So much so, that I even survived them taking 19 vials of my blood.

My husband and I gave up dinners out, cable, and quite frankly lost a few friends during the infertility war, because we weren’t a whole lot of fun to be around. We couldn’t go out to dinner, said no to activities and trips so that we could pay for treatments. I gave up drinking on the advice of my doctors, gave up soda, worked out twice a day.  Infertility consumed all of our time and resources and we didn’t have a lot of emotional reserves.

You would think this all changed when we had our girls, our miracles. It did, I’ve never been happier, but trust me, the first year with newborn twins is rough.  We didn’t leave our house for non-essentials for at least 9 months.  I burned every meal I attempted to cook for the first six months. Hell, I’m lucky I managed to keep my job on the 2 hrs of sleep I was getting a night in a series of short 20 minute naps.

Just when the girls started sleeping, we were blessed with the chance to adopt. The chance to adopt with an amazing whirlwind, but kept us in the same state.We would work late into the night on fundraisers for the adoption.  Our reasons for not sleeping and scraping by changed, but the overall state of our lives wasn’t really different.

I’ve had two surgeries as part of this cancer, but I’ve also had 7 surgeries in the last five years- what was two more? My overall health issues, have helped me have perspective for this journey and our current lifestyle has made this an easier transition than I would have guess.

For me, being told that I need to stay home because I’m neutropenic and my white blood cells aren’t high enough to fight off an infection; doesn’t really change my life a whole lot. A lot of what I hear in my support group, just doesn’t apply because it was already stripped away from me throughout the last five years.  I guess, it’s just not the same shock to the system.

Don’t get me wrong, the thought that I could not be hear to see my children grow, to finally have time to just enjoy being married to my husband tears me apart, but infertility and adoption have taught me that sometimes you just have to have faith.  Sometimes you are not the one in control and I can only focus on the things within my control. Infertility gave me experience reading the medical studies and interpreting them to make sure I can advocate for myself, but my time in treatment also gave me ability to know when to stop googling.

Our adoption was a leap of faith, and so is this journey.  I have to believe in my team of doctors. I have to have faith that the treatment will work. I have to acknowledge this is out of my hands and focus on what’s in my control- how I manage the day-to-day and how I make sure I’m there for my children and my family. There is a higher power at work here.

Mostly, I just believe that I will beat this.  Dying is simply not an option, I have far too much to live for. So I will do what I’m told, I will work to manage my side-effects and I will arrange my days so that I have energy at the most important times – morning time and bedtime. Because that is what matters.  Time with my family. It reinvigorates me, gives me a reason to laugh and reminds me just how much I am loved.