A Surreal Day

I know, I know, I know...I promised Pete that I would stop thinking about this cancer as being "surreal", but I can't help it! Today was surreal! It was an absolutely gorgeous day -- blue skies, flowers blooming, birds chirping, 60+ degrees -- basically a perfect day for being outside and a perfect example of why we love living in California so much. Unfortunately for me, though, I was inside going through "chemo training" and getting measured, poked and prodded in preparation for radiation treatments. Until today, I think that a part of my brain was still able to deny that this whole nightmare was actually happening to me, but today it all became crystal clear.

So the reason that I was even at chemo training and radiation simulation was that I finally decided to move forward with treatment, despite the fact that we still do not have a positive biopsy. This was a really hard decision for me to make. If I am lucky, the tumor will be completely gone by the end of the radiation treatment and so we might never know for sure whether it was "invasive cancer" or something less sinister. But I guess that I feel in my heart that it truly is cancer -- the ultrasound shows it, the CT scan shows it, the PET scan shows it. As the doctors are clearly fond of saying, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's most likely a duck." (Do they teach that in med school??) My cousin, Jeremy, asked me over the weekend what I would do if I had a third biopsy and it came back benign (e.g., still not showing positive proof of invasive cancer). My response to him was that I would still move forward with treatment just to be safe. His response was "Then why wait? Why not start the treatment now?" His point stuck with me and made me realized that questioning the biopsy results was just my way of delaying the inevitable. The thought of subjecting my body to chemo and radiation completely freaks me out. It doesn't matter that the nurses have urged me to think of the treatment as "medicine", or friends have suggested that I think of it as "poisoning the Bitch". The reality is that it will also be poisoning ME!

As I was laying on the radiation table today getting measured and marked, I shut my eyes tight and concentrated as hard as I could to envision my two beautiful children. And I reminded myself that I am walking through this fire for them, for us. Maybe it's not really cancer; maybe this will all be for nothing. I may never know. But the reality is that walking through this fire is the only way that I can be 100% confident that I am doing everything I can to survive, and at the end of the day, surviving is all that matters.