PROGRESS: Day 5.6

I feel fortunate to say that these progress updates feel pretty uneventful! The biggest challenge has definitely been the mental challenge. From a side effects perspective, I still have the gross heart burn, the mouth sores and hot flashes. I definitely have hair shedding, but so far I can’t really say my hair has thinned too significantly. I had pretty thick hair to begin with so maybe I’m mostly fortunate in that the shedding isn’t too unusual and/or is less noticeable. The heart burn is pretty annoying and can be a little miserable at night. The hot flashes are probably the worst thing so far (but I really can’t complain too much if that’s really the worst thing). I suppose the last thing would just be the fact I can tell my body is in a general state of inflammation that makes my sleep less restful, I retain more water and I’m quicker to fatigue.

Those things are all manageable. The harder challenge those side effects present is that they serve as a constant reminder that – I had cancer. In my body. We cut it out. We think it’s gone. We are blasting my body to make sure it’s definitely gone. But who knows? Only time will tell. There isn’t 100% certainty. That’s hard for me to deal with, too – the lack of certainty. The fact I can’t know if I’ll still be alive 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now. The fact I can’t know that going through all of this will absolutely pay off. It’s so weird how you can know you aren’t going to live forever and that nothing in life is guaranteed, but also be so specifically scared about the cancer. The diagnosis of cancer is something more tangible. There are probably other things that are like that, too. Things that shake your innate feeling of safety and security. Cancer messes with your natural assumption that you are going to be around even though you don’t have any certainty in expecting that.

While it doesn’t exactly feel like invincibility, death is just not something you worry too much about because you do things to stay safe. Especially when you are young. Sure, bad things could happen, but they probably won’t. Or, at least, those bad things won’t happen to you. You wear your seatbelt, you wear a helmet, you look both ways before crossing the street, you eat well, you exercise, etc. You mitigate your risks. But it’s the fact that not all cancers can be mitigated exactly. I didn’t do anything (that we or anyone knows of) to get breast cancer. It’s not my fault I got cancer. I did all of the general healthy things to try and prevent it. But ultimately, I was just unlucky. And that vulnerability can only be truly appreciated when it’s your own body that has been breached. You can rationally understand, but you can’t feel the true impact of it until your body betrays you. That is most certainly true for anyone who goes through some event or illness that does that.

I know from reading other people’s stories that people either feel like it’s their fault they got cancer or other people make them feel like it’s their fault. That is crazy to me and makes me angry. Until we know what causes cancer, it can’t be your fault. There are probably way more things we don’t have control of that could contribute, but if you don’t even know what those things are what are you supposed to do about it? It probably seems like we are closer to having even better treatments than we are to necessarily understanding what causes cancer. I know one of the near-term goals of cancer research is to turn it into a chronic disease. I doubt anyone who has it would want it to be a chronic disease, but if you look at things like HIV I’m sure it would be amazing to be told “Look, you’ll live with this your whole life, but we know with 100% certainty it won’t kill you if you manage it.” That would be pretty amazing.

Cancer is probably the confluence of several things with a dash of bad luck. And it could probably be a combination of many different things for different people, which would make it difficult to pin down what “causes” cancer. If I were going to give some prognostication, I would bet heavily on the involvement of viruses. Cervical cancer was found to be heavily linked to a handful of strains of HPV. The Gardasil vaccine was designed and rolled out in 2015. That means that the youngest girls who received it were born in 1996. A paper looking at the impact of the vaccine rollout on young women in the UK found that basically they were able to eliminate the risk of cervical cancer to women, especially those who were 12-13 when they received their vaccines. That’s amazing! Probably a lot of women end up infected with HPV, but only a portion of them would go on to develop cervical cancer. But by determining that a huge portion of cervical cancers required infection with one of these strains of HPV, and, by developing a vaccine, you eliminated the obligate precursor to cervical cancer! You then saved thousands of women every year from the diagnosis and possibly death. I could only hope that something like that ends up being true for breast cancer. I would be overjoyed to find out that we could get Maddie vaccinated and her risk of breast cancer would be almost eliminated!

But these are the types of things I read and research to help me cope. To give me hope or reassure me. It’s a way that I try to “logic” my way into feeling like things will get better. There are a lot of people out there looking and researching and I believe we will find something. It might not be a cure, but it might not have to be. None of this changes what I have to go through now or the implications it has on my life. But it just helps me to be generally hopeful. And at the end of the day I just need to try and make the most of whatever time I have.

The halfway point is quickly approaching in my treatment! I need to try and stay focused on getting to the other side and then I can start to heal. I can work on stopping to try and answer the “what-ifs” and I can celebrate each great day that I have with Maddie, Sean, my family and my friends.

… and I need to get those golf clubs!