VENTING” FEARS AND DEPRESSION

June 12, 2024

I’ve only been able to eat a bowl of cereal in two days. I wake up crying in the night and can’t go back to sleep. I actually had the nerve to ask God “why are you doing this to me? Hasn’t lifelong juvenile arthritis with all that entails been enough?” I quickly apologized for that impertinence! But the point, the thought the terror remains. Why did this have to happen to me?

I know I seemed positive after my appointment on Monday, but I do tend to blow off the negative feelings in public. I also didn’t have the rest of the story. Yesterday, I got a terse note from someone at Dr. Z’s office, explaining next steps. One of the reasons I have to wait to get the meds is that they come through a mail order pharmacy. Once I hear from them, I am to call for an appointment with the “education nurse” at the oncologist office. In the meantime, Dr. Z prescribed two meds for me, and I am to bring those to the education appointment with me.

I went on to check out what notes Dr. z wrote about me in his after visit area of my appointment info online. He did say some very nice things about me, warm, positive, friendly, all very nice, and how I generally try to behave. But then I read these words when describing my cancer. “incurable, but treatable.” Incurable but treatable. This has set me on a tizzy of fear, anxiety, and nighttime insomnia and tears. He’d implied during the appointment that I’d be taking the cancer meds forever, but I guess I hadn’t really let that become reality. Truly, forever? Doesn’t this stuff go in to remission, ever? Do I have to take potentially deadly and expensive meds for the rest of my life? Having looked up info about cabometyx, and the fact that even before I’ve had one pill or even a breath of side effects, my oncologist is prescribing nausea and vomiting meds to combat those side effects, yell yeah, I’m in a tizzy. In a panic, frantic and seeing my future as a dim unhealthy life.

People will probably comment that I’m making too much of this or having ridiculous emotional reactions, but if you’ve never stood by in helpless agony, watching someone you love die bit by bit from cancer and the treatment for that cancer, you can’t understand the stark terror I feel right now. I don’t want that to be my life! I don’t want those who love me to have to stand by in helpless agony and watch me go through it, wishing with everything they have that they could just do *something* to ease things or make them go away. Until a person wears either variety of these shoes, having it, or loving someone who has it, you just can’t understand. That’s a good thing overall, because I would never wish that on another human being, ever.

I don’t know what to do about all these feelings, except to write them out, expel that tangled knots inside me through my words, words that in one way or another have been my way of dealing with the worst things. I have never been able to write about Dad’s cancer and ultimate death, but hopefully, I can write about mine. Yeah, Father’s day is coming up, and that may not help my frame of mind right now, but I think I’d feel all these things without that piled on top.

I’m afraid for my future, and I’ve never really felt that before. I’ve been hurt, broken-hearted, mourned losses to death and losses of romance or friends, but even with my juvenile arthritis, I’ve never felt lost and helpless about my physical well-being. My folks and my doctors taught me how to handle my arthritis from childhood, and my life’s goal has been that it will not beat me, that I will, as I say with gallows humor, will walk into my grave, on my own two feet. I can’t find that attitude about cancer, incurable but treatable cancer, not yet. I just find my brain, my feelings, whirling round and round in a never-ending circle of fear and worry. I wish my doctor had a better bedside manner and would have taken time to reassure me. I wish I wasn’t playing the waiting game again, just waiting to hear from some unknown pharmacy, and then be educated. I wish; I wish; I wish … so many, too many things.

I’m scared.