It only takes a couple of days to get the results back and it's good news: It does not appear that the cancer has metastasized to my brain or organs. And the tumors have shrunk a lot—only one of them is still visible, barely.I'm still in the detox phase when I participate in an online panel and reading about why we write about disease. I read my first piece, the one about getting diagnosed (starting at 5:45 if you'd like to watch). I realize as I'm doing it that I've never read it aloud and how different it is, how much more I feel.The other women on the panel have also had breast cancer, but they're years ahead of me. They've already been through chemo, radiation, and reconstructive surgery. One of them has metastatic cancer. Another shares a story she wrote about getting lymphedema six or seven years after going into remission, and I'm suddenly struck by the realization that this is never really going to be over. I've been so focused on getting through chemo that I haven't processed that this will always be a thing.
The cancer cell is a desperate individualist, 'in every possible sense, a nonconformist,' as the surgeon-writer Sherwin Nuland wrote. The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis — 'beyond stillness' in Latin — an unmoored, partially unstable state that captures the peculiar instability of modernity. If consumption once killed its victims by pathological evisceration…then cancer asphyxiates us by filling bodies with too many cells; it is consumption in its alternate meaning — the pathology of excess.
Too literal? It's less than three days away and it's starting to hit me like I knew it would. I'm not worried about the surgery. But what will it be like to wake up and be transformed?This story originally appeared on Medium. Stay tuned for updates from Lindsay Jean Thomson on Tonic.Read This Next: I'm a Ticking Time BombSometimes I feel so happy
Sometimes I feel so sad
Sometimes I feel so happy
But mostly you just make me mad
Baby, you just make me mad
Linger on your pale blue eyes
Linger on your pale blue eyes
Thought of you as my mountain top
Thought of you as my peak
A thought of you as everything
I've had but couldn't keep
I've had but couldn't keep