My coping mechanism is busted....

If I ever believed that the hard part was over now that I'm a full 4 months into clinical remission....I was sadly mistaken.  The "hard part" is no longer marked with hospital stays or poor blood counts but instead marked with emotionally charged moments of crying inexplicably and wondering "what now" and "what's next".  Some who have not been here would say...what next is to live your life.


Seize the day.

Take back the power.

Any number of things that can be stitched on a pillow or made into a bumper sticker.....

And to those well meaning people I give a very affectionate finger (you can choose whichever one you'd like) and I pull out the old adage, "until you've walked a mile in my shoes"...basically suck it!

For someone like me who relies on words to express myself, joke my way through the rough stuff and to just amuse myself its completely unnerving to find myself in a place of feeling my voice waiver.  I'm finding myself sliding into the gray.  Not the dark place that I resided in before my diagnosis.  Depression has never "left the building" so to speak.  Yes, the Prozac keeps it at bay but even in moments like these, that border just upon the delicate edge of that bottomless dark rabbit hole...I feel the swirl of uncertainty.

The doctors tell me that this is "normal".  Maybe that is my problem....I've never thought of myself as "normal" so that could explain the foreign feeling.  My mother tells me that given the fact that I had deadly chemicals pumped into my body every 28 days for 5 months that I should expect it to take at least that much time, if not more, to find a balance within my body once again.  Ummmm....probably true, but how often have I listened to my mother in my lifetime?  Yeah, I think I can count those times on one hand....or maybe on just a couple fingers.


I paste on a smile a lot because to be honest people really don't want to hear exactly how you're doing on the bad days.  They don't want to hear about the uncontrollable bouts of pain that comes from organs that are pissed about the "side effects" to treatment and the fact that the doctors won't respond to their persistent attempts at making it known that they would like to leave the building...so to speak.

All I can do is move from one moment to the next in hopes that I will find my footing once again and perhaps stumble upon the gene or trait that gets me through this next phase without folding in on myself and pushing away the ones that love me most and root for me even when I seem to have lost my voice.