5 Years

(My chemo scarf I wore.)

Exactly five years ago tomorrow (January 23rd), I was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia. Officially, I will be a cancer survivor. I remember on that hectic day of getting settled in room 417 (I would do two months total in that hospital room) one of the nurses telling me that when a cancer patient reaches five years after diagnosis that they are considered a survivor. That date is now here but I don't feel as if I've survived, to be honest.

Cancer really f*cks a person up in so many ways, especially in ways that you are not warned about on dx day. Nowhere in the overload of wig catalogs or cancer information or drug brochures does the cancer team warn a patient about chemo brain or the scars no one sees. They don't warn about survivor guilt. They don't warn a person about families who don't recognize that you're still sick even though you're out of the hospital.

I went through four days of the "red devil" drug that took my hair and damaged my heart and 12 pills a day for over a year of one drug that gave me a rash so bad that it hurt to move and dried out my lips so bad that it hurt to talk. Those pills cost my insurance company $6000 a month. They balked at paying it at first which really made me feel that I don't matter, a feeling I have dealt with all my life and a feeling that has been beating me down a lot lately.

They paid for the drug eventually along with 50 days of arsenic, more of the red devil, three bone marrow biopsies and heart tests and chest X-ray after chest X-ray and a year of maintenance chemo. I ended up with an infected Groshong that they tried to save for two weeks before removing and putting in an under the skin port so I could be poked and poked and poked.

There was nothing Hollywood about my cancer experience. I deal everyday with the scars no one sees or understand. No one asks if my blood tests results come back good. No one asks me how I'm doing. Cancer leaves a person with so many emotions - anger, sadness, disappointment, confusion just to name a few. These emotions don't automatically stop stop tomorrow and I don't think that they ever will and that's what really makes cancer suck. I may be a survivor based on a calendar date but with chemo brain and all those emotions still beating at me, it's very hard to believe the survivor label.