I have a PET scan tomorrow, and I’m having a nervous breakdown.
I’m thinking all the thoughts and all the what-ifs.
I’m scared.
I’m worried.
I’m wondering if the cancer has come back.
It’s seriously insane how one scan feels like it has the power to determine my entire future life path.
Or maybe there’s no future.
I live in limbo.
Some days I wake up and forget that I even have cancer.
Other days I wake up with this sense of dread, thinking that the cancer will probably come back and I’ll probably be dead in three years.
Wow.
It’s crazy to even write that.
I don’t even know what to do with myself right now.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m even back in school.
Should I be doing homework and worrying about assignments?
Or should I just be trying to enjoy whatever time I have left?
Why am I making my life so complicated right now?
It’s an awful feeling to live in this unknown.
To live from scan to scan.
To live with this constant fear.
I think about death all the time.
I think about what I would want if I were dying. I don’t want aggressive life-saving measures if there’s no meaningful chance of recovery. I don’t want to be kept alive by machines, and I don’t want to be resuscitated at the end of my life.
These are things I actually think about now.
I can’t escape my own thoughts.
I’m a complete blubbering mess!
I think I’ve been in denial for so long that maybe it’s finally catching up with me.
I couldn’t even process what Stage IV meant when I was diagnosed.
There’s no finish line where someone tells me:
Okay! You’re done! Cancer is over!
Instead, I’m told there’s no cure, but there are treatments. We keep treating it for as long as the treatments work.
And somehow I’m supposed to figure out how to live my life while knowing that.
I’ve read statistics about metastatic breast cancer that absolutely terrify me.
I feel like I’m living on borrowed time.
And now I get paranoid about every little ache or pain.
Yeah, sometimes a headache is just a headache.
But cancer has turned me into someone who can take one tiny symptom and immediately imagine the worst possible explanation.
Two months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night violently throwing up.
This is really unusual for me because I can count the number of times I’ve thrown up in my entire life on one hand.
At first I thought:
Maybe it’s food poisoning. Maybe I ate something bad.
I didn’t think too much about it.
Then about a month later…
It happened again.
I woke up in the middle of the night and barely made it to the bathroom because I had to throw up so badly.
Something just didn’t feel right.
I’ve also continued having problems with my hearing that started during chemotherapy.
Sometimes I’ll get ringing in my ears, and then I’ll have this bizarre sensation like the hearing in one ear is shutting off and then moving to the other ear.
After the second vomiting episode, I made the mistake of researching my symptoms on Google.
And…
BOOM.
Brain metastases.
I completely flipped out.
NO. OH MY GOD. NOOOOO.
This can’t be happening.
I can’t have this shit spreading to my brain.
At my next oncology appointment, I told the nurse practitioner that I’d been feeling really paranoid and started describing everything that had been happening.
I didn’t even say the words brain metastases.
I just sort of stopped talking.
Maybe my eyes were really huge and terrified-looking because she looked at me and said:
“You think it’s spread to your brain?”
Yeah.
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
I told her I’d Googled my symptoms and that’s what came up.
She told me that she wasn’t seeing anything in my bloodwork that was concerning and didn’t think that was what was happening. But she also said that if it would make me feel better, she could order brain imaging.
I said I didn’t want to do it.
We decided that if I had another episode like that, I’d let her know and we’d revisit the scan.
And she also told me…
STOP GOOGLING.
Probably good advice.
Another thing that’s been weighing heavily on me is that one of the cancer bloggers I followed has died.
I started following her around the time I was diagnosed because I was desperately looking for other people living with Stage IV cancer.
She had young children and shared so much of what she was going through. Eventually, her cancer progressed and she entered hospice.
And then she was gone.
I didn’t know her personally.
But her death shook me.
Because when you’re living with Stage IV cancer and following other people with Stage IV cancer, their stories can start to feel like possible versions of your own future.
And right now, with this PET scan tomorrow, that’s really hard for me to separate from my own fear.
Please, God.
Please let me have a good PET scan.
I’m not ready to die.
I mean, if I have to, someday I’ll have to accept it.
But I’m not ready.
Why me?
What did I do in my life to deserve this?
Nothing.
Maybe there isn’t a reason.
Maybe this is just what happened.
But tonight…
I’m scared for my life.
