Mt. Sinai
It's perhaps no surprise that even though for months all I hoped for was the cytoreduction HIPEC surgery, I no longer think about it. Not burned into my brain, those most stressful two weeks of my life, when I knew it was going to happen, but before I'd submitted the forms, signing away potentially seven organs or partial organs. I remember a specific horror, but indirectly, at the days leading up. I only think of it when I see the scar, and my missing belly button, and I've learned not to look.
I suspect I'd remember things very differently had I any recollection of being told that things had failed. That the cancer was my doom. That I would leave the hospital, but that my time was more limited than we thought and I'd never really get to recover from the surgery (the only bit of luck I retained, the cancer has beat me, but it took longer than a couple months).
But all I remember is my hatred for the nasal-gastric tube (the same one that sustains me now, which I've grown to love), arguing with the surgeons about it, freezing at night (the origin of my beloved goose toque) and the greatest luxury I've ever had the joy of experiencing - ice chips on a nothing by mouth diet.
We all wish my time at Mt. Sinai went differently. It's the difference between a life and an absence. But it didn't, and that thought is one of the truly forbidden thoughts I've never, nor will ever, entertain. It's a fixed, unchanging, point in time. Like diagnosis and that final trip to emergency that put me here.
This is all traumatic. Very traumatic. My mind has clearly done things to protect itself. Had things gone differently, I'd have spent the last year working through it. But instead I've spent the social worker time working through end of life concerns, preparing for where I am now.
I hesitate to publish this, for the first time ever. I'm as okay as I can be in my state, I've made my peace with the things I need peace with, and I do my best to honour each new day I have. Like all other scrap book posts, this is about joy, and finding it everywhere, it's just harder sometimes.
When I was discharged from Mt. Sinai, my destination was sadly set, and I could have chosen any path to get there. I chose adventure and joy and life and zoo dates and fish and chips and pho and antiquing and Squishmallows and the sun hanging low for hours in the autumn sky. I chose all of you over despair and defeat and, likely, an earlier trip to hospice. Hoapice was inevitable, but writing about it is a choice and a victory