Cancer Free!

As of September 12th, 2017 I am officially cancer free! I finished my last radiation that morning and although I didn’t ring the radiation bell it felt so good to walk out of there knowing that I was cancer free and that I could finally start getting my life back to “normal”. It will be a new kind of normal but I can have a regular routine again and Nick and I can finally start to feel like a married couple. I don’t really know what I mean but we have put a lot on hold this year and I just want us to be able to be together and start to live the life we have talked about. Before I go into full reflection mode I will give a quick recap of my radiation process.

Originally I was supposed to have 30 treatments of radiation for a total of six weeks. However, I was eligible for a study that my radiation oncologist was heading that allowed me to have 19 treatments for a total of four weeks; either way the radiation was going to be daily [Mon-Fri]. We encountered a problem early on that I had a trip planned for work on September 12th and I couldn’t change it, which meant we had to fit 19 treatments into 13 days. In order to do this that meant that I was going to need two treatments a day on some of those days and in the end due to a holiday and the machine breaking down one day I had to have two treatments the majority of the days. Since my radiation was at the University it was very easy for me to just walk over during work, get radiation and come back to work as it did not take that much time for the appointment. From the time I left work to the time I got back to work it was approximately 30-40 minutes depending on the day. When I arrived they already knew who I was, they would hand me a buzzer and once that went off I walked back to the dressings room to change. Once changed I would wait for a phone to ring that when I answered they would tell me it was my turn to come to the room. I went to the same room every day but twice and mostly had the same team members every day as well. I would lay down, put my arms over my head and lay completely still while they positioned me correctly for the treatment. After I was positioned they would leave the room and we would begin. The whole process was about 5-8 minutes, I would hold my breath for 30 seconds while the machine moved across me once and then two more times. Each time the machine moved across me I would hold my breath for 30 seconds or at least as long as I could. This is not how every radiation treatment is this was just the process that was decided for me, the holding of my breath helped move my heart out of the way so it wouldn’t be affected by the radiation.

After the first few days I started to notice that my skin was feeling tight and my arms would get sore, I also couldn’t put much weight on my arms or chest muscles. Side effects from radiation are not nearly as bad as they are with chemo, you get some redness to the skin, fatigue, tightness and for me a sore throat or the feeling that something is stuck in your throat. I am only a few days out right now and the side effects haven’t been bad, they are accumulative so I could still have some side effects over the next few months as well. Right now I am combating fatigue with exercise and I am combating the redness of the skin by using Vanicream, which came at the recommendation of my team. All in all, things have been really good and I can’t complain. We’ll see how things go over the next few weeks but right now I am very optimistic as how the rest of my recovery time from radiation will be.

At the beginning of this year this day seemed so far away, and there were so many questions and uncertainties that I felt it would take forever to get here. Yet, here we are, it seems like it happened so fast and I can’t believe I am able to say that I ‘HAD’ cancer. It’s remembering moments like this that help me get through some of the hardest times in life, I know that even though during the moment I feel like everything is taking forever, I know that at the end of it all it will feel like it went by in a blink of an eye. It will just be another chapter in life and that’s what this is, it was just another chapter in my life and now I can turn the page to the next one. This chapter has been one of the most important in my life, it has taught me so much and when I come to the end of the journey it’s hard not to reflect.

Some of you may be thinking that I’m not fully done and you are right, I still am going to be receiving a drug through my port until February, I still have to take a pill daily where the bottle says “Take once a day for cancer…” and I will still have occasional scans and doctor visits but at the end of the day… I DON’T have cancer anymore and that’s what matters to me right now. All the big hurdles that we needed to get over to concur cancer we have jumped over, they were not easy but we did it. At the beginning of the year when they sat us down and told us the steps we were going to take I categorized everything in my head as three big steps and a bunch of little steps in the middle and the completion of radiation was the final big step and it’s done. Even though radiation was every day, sometimes twice a day, it went the fastest out of everything. Sometimes I am still in shock that it’s all done but I also still have a hard time believing I had cancer this year.

There are these moments where I just sit and stare and think about this year or the moment that I am in and how much has changed. From the moment the doctor gave me the results of my biopsy my whole world shifted and I started to think differently. Having cancer and going through all these emotions is something that many of you will not understand, and that’s okay, I truly hope that you never fully understand how I feel. There has been so many times that I have said cliche things and now is no different; my eyes have been opened and I have a different outlook on life. One of the reasons that I decided to begin sharing more of my story and my future is because I am hoping that I can help people through my words and my actions as opposed to them having to go through what I have to learn it. After I was diagnosed there wasn’t a minute in my day where I didn’t think about the fact that I had cancer, it never left my mind. Whether I was pouring coffee, driving or sitting in a meeting, all I did was think to myself “here I am doing this thing and I have cancer.” It was weird. It’s something that I don’t know will ever leave me. Every day I think about it, and sometimes I get to push it to the back of my mind and pretend it didn’t happen but it always finds its way back, which is okay. The reason I say it is okay is because it helps to remind me how far I have come this year and how much I’ve changed. From the beginning I knew that no matter what happened this year I would come out of this stronger than I was before. I would learn things that would change me forever. There are silver linings in everything, you just have to find them.

I will be using this site/blog as a way to share my reflections that I documented throughout the year as well as my reflections moving forward. I find myself identifying as I believe many other cancer patients/survivors do, there is life before cancer and there is life after cancer. I want to continue to share what I have learned and what I continue to learn as I move forward with my life and I hope others join me in the journey and continue to share with me their experiences. Life is a journey no matter what your situation and I believe we learn some of the greatest things in life by sharing with one another, we also learn to better understand people and situations when we share.