Radiation Oncologist

Matt and I have a few mottos that we have come up with for this whole situation. One of them is "It's better knowing than not knowing."

The week before the colonoscopy was awful. I knew something was really wrong, my doctor had done the whole head nod thing when I mentioned cancer and I just knew in my gut that something was terribly wrong.

After the colonoscopy, we knew there was a tumor but didn't know for sure if it was cancer. Waiting for those biopsy results felt like a month, though it was only 6 days.

The fear and anticipation of every test result, every doctor's visit - it has all been worse than the knowing for sure what was actually happening.

Until yesterday.

I have been waiting to write this post until I was in a better mood. People keep saying that my blog is funny and so now I feel all this pressure to be funny. I am not really a funny person in real life so I try to wait until I am in a funny mood to write. Haha, does that make sense? But I can't promise that it will always be funny, it might always be depressing and sad. I don't know. I sure hope not.

But, anyway, I don't think a better mood is coming my way any time soon.

I think the information hit me hard because it was so unexpected. I tried to do a bit of research about radiation but got freaked out and stopped reading. So when my radiation oncologist started discussing the side effects and likely outcomes from the radiation, I was wholly unprepared.

Short term side effects are simply fatigue.

Got it. No problem. That is also a side effect from chemo. I can deal.

Some of the long term complications from radiation include long term fatigue and bowel troubles. Um, ok, fantastic. Are we talking Depends here or what? Who knows, we won't know for sure until it happens. Ok, I'll deal. I just want to live, I keep saying.

The complication that has me throwing a tantrum is that radiation will "likely" (in the doctor's words) cause early onset menopause because they basically fry your ovaries and uterus. It is "likely" that I will also have to have a hysterectomy when I have my surgery to remove the tumor because of it's location and the fact that it might already be diseased. I may or may not know about this beforehand, it might just be something that is decided during surgery.

Our family is complete (thank goodness) so the fact that I will never be able to carry a child again doesn't matter. But I'm pretty pissed that stupid cancer is making me go into menopause at 31 years old. Stupid stupid stupid cancer.

Also, the doctor showed me my ct scan. No one else had done that yet. I got to see the tumor and unfortunately right next to it, there were a few infected lymph nodes so we know for sure that the cancer has spread.

I just don't want anything to change. I just want my beautiful, simple, sweet, vanilla life to stay the exact same. And cancer just won't leave me alone and it just keeps taking one thing after another. Day after day it seems like it takes more and more. I'm terrified that once it is done with me, there will be no parts of me that are actually left.