Choices

Today I did both walks and drove to the store. I helped to bring bags in from the van. All of this left me exhausted and I'm wondering if there will be a point when it doesn't leave me that way. On Wednesday, I go to Fort Smith to check on radiation stuff. If it works out, I'll be back for treatment there. If not, I'll have to go to Tulsa. Both options have good and bad points. I try to focus on the good points and not worry about what will happen. It's really my only choice.

I've been talking about the things that have happened to me in the last several months. These things have changed a lot about who I am and how I view the world. I think on the outside, everything seems the same, but on the inside, I feel very different. On the inside, there are a lot of broken spaces. There is a lot of damage. I'm not sure how long it's going to take me to repair all of that, or even if I can. I'm not sure who I will be when all the dust settles.

One of the things that affected me since January has been my lack of choices. More than ever in my life, I have found myself in situations where I had very little say in the matter. What I wanted meant nothing. Things just went along as they would. I did not want to bleed horribly for days on end, but I did. It was frightening. I felt powerless. I felt so out of control of what my body was doing. I felt trapped and enslaved by the bleeding. As I wrote during that time, it was like being chained.

Once I found out I had cancer, I was suddenly in this situation where more choices were taken away. I would be sent to appointments and told where to go and when to show up. I would be told what to eat and when to eat. I would be stuck with needles and probed and left on display. My only choice in most of this was just to refuse completely . . . but then again, that would have meant I probably would have died. "Do _____ or die" really isn't much of a choice.

Even the choices I have been offered were usually matters of suck. "Do you want the radiation that last 2 days or the radiation  that is really intense?" "Do you want the surgery where we rip you open or the one where we use a robot?" When faced with these options, I would do research and decide on the lesser of the evils . . . but it still felt like evil. It still felt like I was more or less powerless.

When you recover from major surgery, especially something like a hysterectomy, you often find yourself back in a position of feeling powerless. It takes your waste management organs quite a while to settle down, and the more adjustments your body makes, the more upheaval this system goes through. Simple trips to the bathroom can become ordeals and during those ordeals, the thought crosses your mind that this may not be a temporary thing. This may be your life from now on and that is damned scary.

I know in the grand scheme of things, the level of powerlessness I've experienced over the last several months is nothing compared to what many people face on a daily basis. But for me, in my life, it was a profound amount of lack of choice. It frightened me. It humbled me. And it has made me feel differently about my sense of control in my own life. I'm not sure what that means yet, but it is certainly one of the major changes I have recently experienced.