Transitioning to a New Life
This week closes out my first three months of living with metastasized cancer. Stage IV Ovarian Cancer to be exact. As someone commented, “a bump in the road’ to which my sweetie responded “yes, a major bump in the road.” But he laughed as he said it. We stay still saddened by our new realities but also feeling like “We are and will be okay.”
So here is a little snapshot of our moment.
I am glad to be leaving the poorly scripted emergency phase of shock and awe. Frankly, I can’t look back and begin to figure how we could have coped without the swift intervention of so many caring souls. Mike and I bumbled through those first few weeks as grief stricken automatons. There is just nothing reasonable about having everything we carefully constructed and adore about our lives being torn to shreds. Add to that the trigger word of “cancer” combined with “advanced” and our ability to grasp reality disappeared.
Month one we were in full shock. Month two we realized it was time to get with the game. And, by the close of this month we are feeling about 60% present. July 20th marked the close of our emergency trimsester.
Mike and I are doing well. Being protected by family and friends allows us the space to catch up. We do not like our reality but we are ready to deal with it as the loving team that has carved out a homestead in the woods and pushed for new frontiers in justice organizing. We will deal with it as the same loving team. Now we calibrate options for homesteading and organizing with one new reality, getting me into a very long term remission (length of time in 1st remission correlates with length of life.) There is no recipe for staying in remission. We recognize our limitations and the serious stakes we face. But we also feel hopeful.
Medical staff at Kaiser actually used the word ‘great’ in a sentence describing how I was doing – a first from the world of dour oncology. And my tumor marker continues a jolly downward trend not only indicating it is a useful tool to assess how I am responding to chemo but also that I am on a clear trend towards remission.
One bittersweet recognition is that my permanent health status might require me to be in thick of resources vs the woods. Leaving the woods, the pond, the year round garden and our many sources of homestead joy is a tough and still not completed decision. But we are looking for a new home in the city.
The next step in our stabilization phase is returning to living on our own.
livingly dying 