It has been over a year now since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It feels like it was yesterday that I was sitting in my doctors office numb, scared, uncertain, and in disbelief. I am grateful for the second chance that I have been given, I am grateful for everyone who took care of me, I am grateful for the friends that were there from the beginning and continue to be there everyday. With keeping true to my previous blogs I am going to be honest, I am struggling with how to move on. I am struggling with finding a balance between my job and my life. I love my work, the people there, just about everything about MOHC but, as much as I love it I am starting to find it difficult to be there. I thought I had moving on figured out, I thought I was past the worrying, past the letting cancer be a part of my daily life. When you work at a cancer center, cancer is a part of your daily life. It's hard to take the negative thought of what could happen and shut if off when its in your face for 6 hours a day.
Prior to being diagnosed and working there I, as well as co-workers, would find myself putting myself in the shoes of our patients and worrying about headaches, bone pain, and just about everything because you don't want it to happen to you. It is scary, it ruins lives, it takes lives. Then throw actually going through it on top of this and it can become too much to handle. It sometimes feels impossible to not place myself in the shoes of the patients. Seeing the survivors is incredible, it gives you hope, it shows you that you can beat cancer, that every single patient is different, every single cancer is different, if only my day could be full of seeing the ones that survive this. The reality is, we are an oncology office, we see the ones that are not surviving, the ones that cancer has returned and is taking their lives, the ones that fought so hard and their fight wasn't enough, we see the ugly truth behind what it means to be a cancer patient.
It is easy to put on a happy face and a smile and say "yup, I beat cancer" but the fear of recurrence is something that no one else can understand. No one can tell you how to move on or how to feel after you have gone through being diagnosed, chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation, the whole nine. No one can fully understand how hard it is to move one, how hard it is to try and forget what happened, especially since when you look in the mirror and you have 12 scars on your chest, you have a set of boobs that aren't yours, you have this crazy hair that is growing back, you have gained weight thanks to the "anti cancer" pill you take every night, you have to wear a bandage on your arm because it is swollen, it makes it difficult. I fully understand how short this life we have is, that we only get one shot at living, that we need to be happy everyday, I just don't know if I can move on when I am surrounded by it daily. This is very difficult for me, I have been there for 7 years. Cancer has taken so much away from me that I don't want it to take this from me. People think that because you hear the words "cancer free" that everything goes back to normal, it doesn't.
