I’m not that tumor

It’s circular insanity. I’m writing about cancer to stop having cancer be the big deal it is.

See the problem with that?

Look, I’m not trying to minimize anyone’s cancer.  This is my experience.

I’m really sick of it, though. I want to stop talking about cancer and move on to “health” as a concept and here I am talking about fucking cancer anyway.

So if you have cancer, and you go to the doctor a few years later, and you say “hey, so I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and I feel like absolute shit and all my hair’s falling out and my depression is debilitating, and I’ve stopped playing hockey or lifting or doing things I love and every time I move significantly I get deep, flu like aches for days. Not good aches,” and then somehow history comes up and the doctor pounces on what?

Not “debilitating depression.”

But “cancer.”

Did I even fucking say cancer?

Look.

Look, all right, cancer is bad and I can say cancer cancer cancer and everyone is like oooooooooo but my kind of cancer is pissant. It’s a pissant, slow-growing largely non-lethal cancer, so much so that when they told me I had cancer they said to me – right to my face – “ah, well, this is the best kind of cancer to have.”

(I punched no one in the face who said this to me, for which I would like some cookies, please.)

I also found out *three years later* it is actually impossible for my kind of cancer to spread to lymph, and that was three years after I hyperventilated many days thinking about lymphoma.  And my usually very lumpy, bumpy lymph nodes.

Look, the big deal here is not that I had cancer and a lobectomy and elected not to have radiation because – say it with me now –

the cancer wasn’t that big a deal

– the big deal is that Hashimoto’s thyroiditis really fucking sucks and getting treated for thyroid disease never mind depression when you’re a woman in the US is about the most suck-filled, awful, futile process you can possibly imagine.

The doctor says over and over “diagnostic” “imaging” “ultrasound” “specialist” “nodule” and I want to say

SHUT THE FUCK UP I FEEL REALLY AWFUL THERE IS A PERSON SITTING HERE.

Sometimes I just sit in the doctor’s office and zone out as they drone on and fight back tears. They don’t know. I’m a tough girl, and all.

I’ve felt like crap for months now, a while. 38 Studios crashed and burned and with it my benefits and for some reason of utter denial I got state benefits for everyone else in the family and not me.

No blood tests, no routine upping of my levothyroxine while my remaining thyroid lobe eats itself alive (thyrioditis is SO GROSS), nothing.

So now I’m sick.

But all that matters is cancer.

The world is kind of bullshit and there’s not a real point to this post except that while everyone else is saying cancer there’s a whole host of problems requiring our attention.

 

I’m just saying.