I've been off work for a year
My last shift ended at 2300 on September 1st, 2022. The decision wasn't made until around noon on the 2nd, after my partner and I had met the medical oncologist, which means that the 1st was my last day and that, by the end of today, It'll have been off work for a full year.
I knew that I might not come in Friday, that my piggy bank of normal was already nearly empty, and that meeting an oncologist might finish it off. I know that I didn't know if I'd live long enough for treatment. We were extremely pesimistic about my chances.
I genuinely don't know what I expected at this point. I knew that the plan was six months of chemotherapy, then surgery, then recovery, then back to work. I knew chemotherapy was supposed to be six months, that the surgery was fairly major, and that recovery time would be slow, but since I was so young I should bounce back quickly.
Chemotherapy didn't get started right away (two weeks from today is that anniversary), and lasted eight months instead of six. There was a mandatory break between chemotherapy and surgery, because the same drugs that slow tumor cell growth also slow down immune function to heal wounds. And the surgery didn't work.
Had the surgery been successful, I'd be looking forward to returning to work on modified duties sometime in October, or possibly November, depending on how well things are going.
Which finally answers a question I had, that was unanswerable, a year ago: How long does treatment take? For me, around fourteen months, from diagnosis to returning to the so-called real world. Or it would have been, had things turned out differently.
The following was originally posted September 1, 2022
After my shift. I rarely take photos of myself at work. I like my uniform, it's extremely practical. These are some of the only photos that exist of me in it. I had promised myself that I'd take Friday off if it didn't go great, and I guess I was doing the "hope for the best plan for the worst" thing.
