It's safe to say that I was very upset. Distraught might be a better word. Life just carried on around me though. As mum and I sat crying in the waiting room, patients were called in for their appointments, other patients were wheeled in and out, a student nurse brought me some water and then went back to what he was doing. I just wanted to shout,"CAN EVERYONE JUST STOP FOR TWO SECONDS PLEASE?!"
To be honest, there have been more emotional effects than physical effects. As far as physical effects go, I'm tired and occasionally my neck twinges a bit. The thing about being tired is, I don't know if I'm suddenly really tired, or if I'm just noticing it more. Also, I sometimes feel like being tired is just written off as an excuse. It's not just being "a little bit tired" though. Too much activity can really knock me out! I was in town for a few hours last week and was basically knocked out for the rest of the evening! It's very frustrating.
The emotional effects range from angry to sad, to feeling very inconvenienced by this whole thing. The other day, someone asked me if I was sleeping okay. I replied that I am sleeping through the night (unless my bladder or a weird dream wakes me up), but I had noticed that my mattress protector had pinged off, my sheets were messed up, as was my duvet. I may not be having nightmares, but evidently I am tossing and turning a lot!
I usually start feeling sad when I have too much time to think about it all. When my thoughts start circling around. It is okay to be sad, though. I'm mostly positive but it does get to me occasionally, and I allow myself to be sad and seek comfort from family and friends. Luckily I have a great support network and I am thankful for it!
Anger was my initial reaction. I blamed everybody I could think of. Including the doctor who performed the endoscopy and told me he didn't think it was cancer. To be fair though, he did not look me in the eye and definitively say that I don't have cancer. He just thought that based on the fact that I'm young, relatively healthy and not a smoker, I probably don't have cancer! After that I just blamed myself, and wondered where I had gone wrong. The thing is, sometimes you can just be plain unlucky. You could exist on a diet rich in antioxidant foods, drink loads of green tea, and cross the road to avoid secondhand smoke. If you did all that and STILL get cancer, then it's like,"What happened? I'm doing all the things!" Obviously, it is important to try and live a healthy lifestyle, but if you do and you still get cancer, just don't blame yourself. Sometimes, you can just be ridiculously unlucky.
Then there's the frustration. Things would annoy me slightly before, have become intensely annoying since being diagnosed. For instance, the other day the flush on our toilet stopped working. What did I do? I cried. I cried because it was yet another thing in my life that I couldn't fix myself. I couldn't make it go away easily.
I'm naturally a positive person though, and I won't let this turn me into a bitter, angry person who hates life. I don't hate life. I hate cancer. So I'm going to beat it!
You are going to beat it. I do believe if anyone can, you will. My mother-in-law reminds me a lot of you in that you are both incredibly sweet, positive people who are always very supportive of the people in your lives and she had breast cancer and she is completely fine now. She actually also had what you had when she was very young but it was the 60s and they didn't even tell her! They just did the treatment. Either way, despite technically having cancer twice, she is doing well and is still as happy and loving as ever :) (And her overall health is fine).
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