Treatment is over, now what?

I know I couldn’t predict how I would feel once I finished cancer treatment, but I think I let myself believe that I would suddenly feel a renewed sense of life.  People would say to me, “I bet you have a greater appreciation for the things in your life now,” and I would think to myself that surely I would feel that way once I was through all the hard stuff.   I should feel almost like Pookie, the little pig in the Sandra Boynton children’s book series, waking up invigorated and ready to take it all on.

Imagine my surprise when treatment ended and I did not wake up feeling like Little Pookie.  In fact, I felt lost.  So much of my world had shattered and I was left to find a way to pick up the pieces.  As much as I wanted to put them back together the way they were before, they just didn’t fit that way anymore.   Would I ever feel like me again?

It’s challenging to not let yourself get caught up in the aftermath of it all.  Silly things get to me.  Will there come a time when I can comfortably wear a regular bra again, or reach to the top of a cabinet without shooting numbness and discomfort, or sleep on my left side without wincing?  And then bigger things get to me.  Did I make the right decisions?  Will it come back?  Am I prone to a bigger, more aggressive cancer in the future?  And let’s face it – people die from cancer.  A lot of people die from cancer.  Suddenly, I’m a cancer patient.  That is some heavy crap to deal with.

I try hard to focus on the positives, that my cancer was caught early and my outcome was so much better than it could have been.  I know how fortunate I am.  But then on the flip side, I find myself at times laced with guilt – why did so many things work in my favor, yet not for others?  How is that fair?  It’s not.  A notion I constantly grapple with – nothing about cancer is fair.

Where to go from here?  I wish I had the answer.  But life goes on, and in the grand scheme of things, I know I’m extremely blessed to have that.  I may be working hard to pick up the pieces, but I’m still here, living a pretty damn good life.  And I hold onto the idea that sometimes when pieces are rearranged, beautiful things can happen.