Post Cancer Paranoia

Cancer has many junctures. The diagnosis, the grieving, the acceptance, the fight mode, the treatment, the surgery, the recovery, just to name a few.

More than a year after my diagnosis and starting chemo, eight months post-surgery, five months post-radiation completion, and two months since my last infusion treatment, I would call the point in time that I am currently in the post cancer paranoia phase.

There is physical evidence of remission; the tumor is gone, surgery scars are healed, hair is growing back, radiation burns are fading, port has been removed. Yet, there are still lingering side effects that affect my daily life: temperamental stomach, menopause, joint pain, swelling and tenderness in my affected breast and armpit, and neuropathy in my affected arm and hand. Oh yeah, and the paranoia. The paranoia that every new ache and pain means the cancer is back and the process will start all over again – or worst yet, it will be the beginning of the end.

I am more than ready to be done with the appointments and the needles and the blood work and the time spent in the waiting room, exam room, and infusion room that has been my life over the last 14 months. At the same time, it feels somewhat foreign and almost threatening to be released from that world. After being so closely monitored, actively fighting against the cancer, and on guard all the time, it feels scary to be left alone to re-enter normal life.

About a month ago, I started to feel sick again. My fatigue was back full-fledged, I was experiencing extreme weakness in my arms and hands, freezing cold all the time, had vision problems, constant stomach aches, and weight gain. On top of that, the fear and stress of what these symptoms could mean left me feeling terrified and depressed.

I had been told to notify my oncologist of any new symptoms lasting longer than two weeks, so I impatiently waited and then contacted my doctor. A brain MRI thankfully showed no metastasis and blood work actually revealed an explanation for the symptoms: my thyroid had pretty much gone on strike. My thyroid stimulating hormone, or TSH, was more than 20 times the standard range.

After fearing that the cancer was back in some form, I greeted the diagnosis of hypothyroidism like a welcomed guest.

The fact is, after the trauma of and adaptation to cancer, it is hard to turn it off. A form of PTSD, my medical team and fellow survivors who are farther out than I have assured me this is normal, common, and will start to diminish with time. But many say that it will never fully go away, it’ll never be completely gone.

It can be tricky for people to remember that just because someone is done with treatment and in remission does not mean that everything is over and you walk away like nothing happened. The physical and mental effects might not always be visible to outsiders, or even those closest to you, but they’re there.

But living in fear that it is going to return feels like a waste of the good days that I longed for when I was sick. Through the fear and the anxiety and the stress, it helps to simply plan for the future. For me, that meant that this spring Nate and I bought our first house, and this summer we got a puppy and I started graduate school.

Yes, there is about a 25 percent chance that my cancer could come back, but as my oncologist Dr. Terstriep reminds me, that means there is a 75 percent chance it won’t and there are currently so many women (and men) who are living healthy lives now 10 or 20 years after surviving cancer. I have to plan for that, and if it doesn’t happen, I will deal with it then. For now, it’s about appreciating everything I went through and came out of, and not letting the paranoia diminish how thankful I am.

#normallife #survivorship #breastcancer #PTSD