To be completely honest, I have struggled with what to share for this part of my journey. I think this is the first time over the last year and a half that words seem to escape me. I just couldn’t fathom finding the words to pinpoint how I’ve felt and how I feel. I’ve thought for weeks to craft the right words and I’ve finally decided that I may never find them, but for me the process of simply just writing seemed to be what I needed. So here we go.
I have been utterly humbled through this journey in so many ways. I have been brought to tears over and over by the amount of love that has been shown to me through this process – through meals, and money, and gift cards, and messages, and thoughts, and prayer, and reading my blogs, and just showing up in general. They say it takes a village when you raise a kid, but I would argue the same for battling cancer – or any unfavorable diagnosis. My cancer ass kicking village means more to me than I could ever put into words, a simple thank you seems to little to express my gratitude. My village has helped me through some of the darkest moments I’ve traveled.
But even in the midst of people surrounding me, loving on me, and constantly being there, I felt so lonely. I felt helpless, I felt useless, I felt so defeated.
I wish there were ways I could share the raw moments of what this recovery has looked like, because man have they been so damn raw. I have struggled much more with this surgery than I did my last – from recovering physically to battling emotional and mental mountain after mountain. I found my most vulnerable moments happened in the shower. There was something trying to take a shower with a drain stitched in your neck, stitches you can’t get wet, and a body that couldn’t move easily without major exhaustion, that made me realize in that moment I couldn’t do the simplest of things. That was such difficult realization. Dilan was a great caretaker for numerous reasons, but in these moments of utter helplessness that he was able to talk me off the ledge of a few panic attacks. This isn’t what I thought my life would look like at 26 – but not I think, by what standards was I judging that by anyway?
I don’t think I really processed the recurrence between when I was re-diagnosed and surgery. Instead I think I processed it as I recovered. I think I processed it all as my body felt as if it was falling apart – because then it felt REAL. I mean I didn’t FEEL sick before surgery. I didn’t FEEL like I had cancer. I felt normal. I didn’t have a lump like last time. By looking at me you, no one would know. And I liked it that way. I liked not feeling like a burden, like a helpless person, like someone whose world was taking a complete 180 again. Like a person who had yet another battle to fight. But after surgery… oh man, did I look the part. It looked real for the first time in a long time. It looked more real than last time. Because instead of a cute little 1 inch incision covered by skin glue, I had a 8 inch gash in my neck held together by stitches and right there for the world to see. I convinced myself that it was kinda cool and made jokes. Dilan and I were watching the Harry Potter movies all the way through during recovery and I joked when Nearly Headless Nick appeared on screen that it was me – a bit gruesome I know but at least I was making jokes right? But after the stitches came out, steri-strips went on and it looked a little less severe.
Then the steri-strips came off… and when I saw what the rawness of it all – no stitches, no steri-strips – looked like, I lost my shit. I buckled down and cried and cried and cried. Not because it hurt. Not because I wasn’t happy to be alive. Not because I felt bad. But because I realized in that moment that for the rest of my life, there would be a permanent reminder of my journey. One that alters what people see when they look at me. One that I can’t easily hide. Sure scars mean you’ve survived something, but that doesn’t always have to make you grateful for them and right now I’m finding it very difficult.
Now that I’m a little further into recovery, I’m back to work. And this last week was probably the most difficult week Ive ever had mentally and physically. You see, on top of my “gnarly scar” as one student called it, I am still working through a lot of soreness and lack of mobility in my shoulder/neck muscles, numbness caused by the irritation of nerves during surgery – which could take 6-12 months to come back, including the nerves that control the left side of my smile, and my voice isn’t quite back yet which makes teaching a difficult adventure.
Overall the neck dissection was extremely successful. They removed 47 lymph nodes, 18 of which were positive for cancer. They had to leave one worrisome lymph node in my neck because it was too close to a nerve and she didn’t want to risk the damage to the nerve. Because of the pathology results and the fact that one had to be left in, it’s most likely I will need another round of radioactive iodine. We are waiting on bloodwork that will measure my tumor marker to see when and how much radioactive iodine will enter my body.
So here I am with a bit of a crooked smile and a prominent scar for the world to see – both reminders that the process of healing is rarely pretty and without imperfection – hoping for an end to be near of the battle that has taken so much from me, but also given me so much, too.
