Holding onto Hope

 Tonight (because my latest chemo regime has the side effect of insomnia) I am officially launching this new blog.  I came to the realization, in the chemo chair, this week, that the leak in my boat of hope, I have been floating in these past 5+ years, has slowly intensified.  The boat has always been leaking because I live with, what is, at present, incurable cancer.  Sane people  would ask, how can you honestly call it hope, isn’t it really a boat of denial, denial, denial? But I have decided to err on the side of optimism unless or until I am struck by a big fat cancer or COVID reality brick chucked my way, that informs me that I’m really the frog in the boiling pot, not the frog hopping around from treatment option to treatment option, like they are lillipads  in my boat of hope.  That said, I am a human not a frog, so I can’t be a frigg’in optimist 24/7.  Welcome to the ‘Living with Cancer long-term 😔.

I will explain what happened in the chemo chair of awesomeness later, but first, I must disclose that Ganja is a great medication to lessen the severity of many cancer side effects, in my, I’m only a patient not a doc, opinion.  To that end, and since I write from a legal state, most late evenings, I’ll be partaking as I blog.  Second aside, I used to not like the word ‘blog’ for some reason, maybe it sounded offensive?, but I now believe that it perfectly describes what I am going to do. Since blogging kinda sorta sounds like barfing, I feel like my brain needs to 🤮 out some fears that have been stewing in a cocktail of anxiety, self pity, and terror of what the future holds.  

The Chair of Awesomeness- I refer to the chemo chair as the “the chair of awesomeness”, it isn’t that I don’t deeply resent or even downright hate it at times, but truth-be-told, it’s comfy; it reclines, it’s heated, it even has a massage feature.  Now for what happened.  I sat down Tuesday afternoon in said chair, after a morning of random nausea and 🤮 .  Another current side effect I have.  And when I’m not feeling well, I get emotional- tears linger just below the surface, and, unfortunately for me, this often can bubble up into full on raging snot-fest sobs at in-opportune times.  So my very busy chemo nurse while also juggling 3 patients, spent time talking and listening to the blubbering mess before her, yours truly. 

 After listening to me and offering up the spot-on diagnosis of “you have a case of  the I don’t give a shits “ (she was quoting her dad),  she also said that it sounded as if I had lost hope.  And then I said something like, what  I really want is to have a reason to keep clinging to some hope. What I was also thinking was  that reality might just be-sinking my boat, before I reach that mirage island of a cure.  My optimism was hit with the reality brick that I was really rowing toward a pin-prick of an island, viewed through a high-powered telescope.

We spoke more, and she offered suggestions, that I politely and maybe with a dash of condescension, swatted away by saying:  yes I have exceptional support from family and friends, yes I’ve read that uplifting author and a bunch more like her; yes I’ve tried support groups, yes I’ve tried keeping a journal and even started a blog when I was a nieve nube in my first weeks after diagnosis. ( I didn’t just fall off the cancer-turnip truck, no ma’m, not me). Now, having marinated on the wise words of my chemo nurse for a few days,  I have decided to barf, I mean blog, on the internet to try to address the brain marinating that has consumed me of late. So what if  the statistical chances, that my mirage is an actual cure, are right down there with winning the lotto, someone’s gotta win that lotto sometime...right?  My optimistic denial just barfed that gem up for any readers still awake at this point.  Reality, I am Schroedinger’s cat.  (Thanks to the Big Bang Theory for giving me this perfect analogy)

I will address all the tiny ways cancer  chips away at what scarce hope a human with an incurable cancer has in the future, but for now I will conclude with this: don’t hold any spelling or punctuation errors against my educators. I was honestly a decent student, but hopeless in the aforementioned skills.  I also graduated from an accredited university with a mid 3’s gpa ,while receiving a well earned D in a class on Logic.Stay safe and keep hopping (now that one really made me 🤮)