One week

The rest of my life awaits

In exactly a week, I will be having open surgery. For better or worse, it will be the last day of life as I know it and the first day of the rest of my life.

Here’s how it will play out: My gyne-oncologist, Dr. N, will open me up to take out the cancer and endometriosis lesions that have been causing havoc in my life for the better part of a year. My inner lady parts, largely unused, will be removed. Samples will then be sent off to pathology to see how extensively the cancer has spread, if at all—something that they couldn’t ascertain in previous tests and imaging. This will determine if I will need further treatment, like chemo or radiation.

It’s possible that an ostomy and bowel resection will be performed, as well. This means I will be given a stoma and pass waste into a bag for some time. I hope my bowels will be so healthy that it can be reversed when I’ve healed enough or, better yet, that it can be avoided altogether. This outcome was always a distinct possibility since my stage IV endometriosis diagnosis, but my previous doctors have been trying to avoid it with minimally invasive treatments. There’s no avoiding it now with the cancer.

Special thanks to Miss Calliope for keeping me grounded.

Still, ending up with the stoma is as good an outcome as I can hope for, considering the worst-case alternative, which I can’t even put into words. There’s also the almost-just-as-bad scenario where they’ll open me up, realize that there’s nothing further they can do, and stitch me back up.

Now, Dr. N is a rockstar in these types of surgeries. He does them three to nine times a week, so I’m in great, capable, very experienced hands.

“You’re young, healthy, and skinny,” he told me in earnest.

But I’ve watched enough Grey’s Anatomy (which I now regret) and read enough stories to realize that these things are never quite cut and dried.

I keep being told to stay positive. But the truth is optimism terrifies me. I feel like being too optimistic is daring fate to do its worst. On the other hand, I’m scared that preparing for the worst will manifest exactly that.

In his book It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, Lance Armstrong wrote:

“To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.

Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.

So, I believed.”

Till now, I’ve been going for a flippant sort of que sera sera, and I’m sure it’s been making me seem increasingly unhinged. But you know what? I can do that. I can be Lance Armstrong.

I, too, can believe.