The Negative Side of Cancer

I told myself I was never going to write anything like this. That my blog was going to be positive and uplifting. Full of jokes, fun, and positive vibe. Let’s be real for a second, life is not like that. As much as I wish I woke up every day with a smile on my face and a positive attitude, that’s just not how it works.

Going through cancer sucks and can be a very lonely experience. Even with all the support from family and friends, you can still feel very alone. Family and friends don’t understand the emotional, physical, and mental trauma you endure daily. Doctors do their best to tell you what to expect, but, unless they go through it, they can’t understand what you are going to feel as you go through it.

I do my best not to allow myself to feel the negative feelings. I try to keep myself focused on the positive and to continue forward because the situation already sucks, and I don’t want to stay in that mindset. But some days it’s not realistic to always be positive. I have been having days lately where I am feeling emotional and angry. The urge to burst out in tears with no trigger has been strong. I’ve also felt angry unprovoked. I have been struggling to sleep. The anxiety of knowing I’m almost done with treatments could be the reason for the lack of sleep, which could explain why my emotions are all over the place. Or it could be that everything has finally caught up with me and my body is just exhausted from the treatments and surgeries. I also force myself to take on parenting without help as soon as I’m out of the hospital.

At the beginning of my treatments, I had people sit with me throughout the day because I was healing from surgeries and could not take care of my toddler myself. But after the last two treatments, I wanted to prove that I could handle being a parent and go through treatments, so I took it on with no help. I felt bad having someone sit with me when I could take care of my toddler when they could be doing things for themselves.

I feel a lot of guilt because my family has had to change their entire lives to help me out. I went from not needing help or depending on anyone to then needing help with everything. I needed my parents to rush me to Albany med back in December to save my life. I need someone to babysit my kids daily so my husband can visit me at the hospital. I need someone to drive to and from appointments because I’m not supposed to drive long distances because of the medications that I am on as well as because of the side effects of the chemo. I also needed people to sit with me all day to make sure nothing bad happened to me or my kids. The constant feeling of being an inconvenience to everyone around me doesn’t help with trying to stay positive. I’ve been told over and over that I’m not an inconvenience and that my family loves being there for me, but I still have days where I feel terrible for what they must do just so I can continue to fight cancer.

I am so thankful for all the support and help I have had these last five months. I know that I would not have been able to make it this far if I didn’t have people in my corner helping me, checking up on me, and just being there when I needed a shoulder. I will forever be appreciative of all that people have done for me as well as all the care packages and well-wishes. I’m also excited that my next treatment is my last treatment and then I can finally start to heal from all this. There will be constant anxiety with each Pet Scan. For the next two years I will have to do scans every three months to make sure the cancer is gone and hasn’t come back or spread anywhere else.

Even when someone beats cancer, it’s not over. There is always that nagging thought in the back of their head that it can come back. If it does come back, it could be worse or more aggressive. Then there is the possibility of having to endure months of treatment again. The fear is always there and that is by far the hardest part of having cancer. No matter how much I want to believe that I will beat this cancer and live a long and healthy life, there is just no way of knowing if it will come back in the future.