Just kidding. I didn’t start writing a book, but I have done a lot of thinking about writing lately. I’ve thought about how I love to laugh about the absurdity of life and then share those stories with others. I’ve thought about how people don’t love that I swear when I write about these experiences. I’ve thought even more about the fact that I don’t have the words to articulate how I’m feeling even though I’m an open book when it comes to my world.
I also have thought a lot about musicisions writing about their life and how their ability to turn those often times painful experiences into something positive impacts me…especially over the last few months…because the last few months have really been something. I’ll rewind…yearly check up to say “everything is fine” turned into months of scans, appointments, more scans, becoming radioactive for the forth time and still not getting any super powers, scans….all leading up to being told there appears to be a recurrence of thyroid cancer. There remain so many positives in this situation in terms of my health and long term prognosis, but something about this time felt different. The positivity that I’ve clung to over the last four years vanished. It was gone. I have made no secret to the fact that I’ve struggled since then.
I’ve also made no secret to the fact that as I sat in the surgeon’s office and he told me that he has lost more patients to the mental health struggle of thyroid cancer than that which is caused by damaged, rouge cells continuing to split that I no longer had a grasp on my mental health. I think in some way, I’ve always had some level of anxiety…weirdly and maybe insensitively enough to people that battle serious anxiety disorders…I think it’s one of the more endearing aspects of my personality…because I’ve always had a relative upper hand over it.
I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I realized as I cried while being told we would have to wait six months before we determine any course of action to address the recurrence of thyroid cancer that I in fact never did and definitely don’t at present have anything close to the upper hand over anxiety or my cancer diagnosis. What I do have is the incredible fortune to be able to access services from an absolutely amazing therapist that I genuinely adore, but even more than that, I’ve started taking antidepressants. Those little fuckers are quite frankly amazing.
This is what clicked into place for me and allowed me to catch my breath for the first time in many years. I’ve also decided to be kinder to myself since I started back in therapy and started on medication. That means I’m working to make better food choices, exercising in ways I enjoy (like yoga with friends), and most importantly drinking coffee again. Yes, you read that correctly…I’ve survived most of the last four years of being a new mom and now the mom of a very sassy four year old without the use of the world’s greatest drug. Coffee can cause issues with absorption of thyroid medication and since it took my body many months to get into a good place on those medications cutting coffee was an easy way to positively influence my body and make the medication more effective at a lower dose…all that is great, but I genuinely missed it. I would creepily walk slowly and breathe deeply in the coffee aisle at the grocery store. I craved it. I had convinced myself that it was the one thing I could “control” in a situation where as a cancer patient I genuinely had no control.
I realized a few weeks ago that it didn’t work. Depriving myself of something I loved in an effort to somehow make me not have cancer didn’t actually work. I laugh as I type that because it’s such a fascinating penance I felt like I paid.
So cheers to coffee and whatever other legal drugs you need to get you through this crazy adventure we all call life.