Well, as you can probably tell by now, my emotions are all over the place, leaving my motivation to go pouring down the drain and my anxiety levels to go through the roof. With less than a month left until I depart on my next great adventure to England, it's become increasingly difficult to focus on any one thing, especially blogging about my cancer. The most difficult day to work up the motivation to write even a short entry was this past Monday, when I was rushing around trying to get a scholarship application put together. I'd been working on a scholarship application for the SAMFund (an amazing opportunity for cancer survivors), which is divided into two parts; while I initially received an email saying that I hadn't made it into Part II of the application process, a few weeks ago, I got another email informing me that my Part II application was due. I've been crazily trying to get everything together, including a note from my doctor saying that I was in remission and giving my remission date or date of last chemotherapy treatment. After a long battle of trying to figure out just who was going to sign my form (this is something the nurse practitioner does, not the doctor), I finally was able to get it emailed back to me (a good two weeks or more after I had given it to them) on the day that I needed to fax it to the SAMFund to be uploaded. Thank god they had people working that weekend because as it turned out, the person who filled out the form had entered 'current' as my end date of treatment, so I had to drive down to my oncologist's office in the city at 7am on Monday morning on the off-chance that someone might be able to fill out the form properly for me.
Unfortunately, this is where I hit a snag. I got down to my oncologist's office, only to find out that the doctor was in clinic all week, the nurse practitioner was out on maternity leave, and the triage nurse was out for the day. The gent at the front desk was lovely and said he would see what he could do for me, as I was clearly frazzled and about to flip shit. I almost wish that he hadn't gone to find someone to sign the form for me. I almost wish that I hadn't woken up to my alarm clock that morning so that I wouldn't have had time to drive down into the city in the first place. Jon finally found a doctor to sign my form for me, but she ended up putting 11/24/2016 as my end-of-treatment date. And why would this upset me? Because I then had to ask her to write a note saying why she put a future date as my end-of-treatment date when I had finished my chemotherapy injections. Unfortunately, her replies were not something that I was prepared to deal with. First, she reminded me that I'm on oral chemotherapy medications for the next two years. Reasonable that she wouldn't write a past date as the end of my treatment when I am still technically doing chemotherapy. So I followed up by asking her to just write a remission date (which I believed to be sometime back in January, when my doctor told me that I was cancer-free). She refused on the basis that I wasn't in remission. I found myself biting my lip in the middle of an office full of people as she explained that remission is reserved for those who have completed the full treatment and are still cancer-free. Somewhere along the line, in our ignorance, my family and I had started using the term 'remission' to describe my state because I was a survivor, I had beaten cancer, and to us, cancer-free and remission were the same thing. They aren't.
Gutted and barely holding it together, I called my mum to tell her the news, sobbing on the phone as the valets at the cancer center tried to tell me things would be okay. Although I have yet to contact my doctor about my displeasure and concerns (I suddenly decided that I was probably going to die in a few days, a sentiment which I had fought hard to overcome, even telling my boyfriend that I needed to find him a suitable girlfriend for once I was gone), the experience made me think of just a few months ago, when I was still in the hospital.
From the time that I was diagnosed until some time quite a bit after I returned home from rehab, I felt emotionally numb. It was like a part of my brain just shut down and disappeared, pack up its bag and decided that moving away was a great idea. In a way, this saved me - I was able to take bad news and let it go in one ear and out the other. Admittedly, there were times when I was frustrated due to being in constant pain. And I told people to 'fuck off' on more than one occasion throughout my treatment. But my happiness, sadness, everything that made me feel like me had disappeared. While I retained bits and pieces of my humour, eventually that too was replaced with a matter-of-fact acceptance that I was going to die. There was no point crying about it. I was sullen. It didn't even bother me when I found myself blandly telling my psychologist that if I had the energy, I would have hung myself just be done with the pain. I said this in front of my mother, and devoid of emotion, I wondered how she was coping with hearing me say something so sad that I truly meant.
There was one day in particular, after I woke up from sedation and things were finally looking up a bit, when I remember talking to the palliative care team and psychiatrist and asking them if I would ever get my emotions back. I didn't know whether or not I missed them; they simply weren't there. It was like I knew how I should respond, but my brain couldn't find the proper reaction that I expected when it reached out. I shed a tear, one single drop, when I saw a commercial for a vacuum on the TV one morning at 4am when I couldn't sleep, which surprised me but also made me wonder if my emotions were there, just buried beneath the trauma of having full-body failure. I asked nearly every day if my feelings would come back. I was suffering from neuropathy in several places in my body, so I wondered if the numbness simply extended straight up to my brain and if it was just a matter of exercising my brain like exercising my muscles and nerves in order to 'wake up' the feeling.
It wasn't until my brother held me in a long embrace one day and whispered in my ear that he loved me and thought that he was going to lose me when things got so horrible that I actually cried. I could feel the tears running down my face as I realised that I could have died without knowing it, without having been able to say goodbye to the people I cared about. It struck me just how afraid I was of death, and the doctors had to drastically increase my depression and sleeping medications after this realisation because I was terrified of falling asleep. Whereas before my treatment, there was nothing that I looked forward to more than sleeping and getting the rest that I knew I needed, I was so afraid that I would lose consciousness again and die without knowing what was going on that I would refuse to let my eyes close. I became more away that I was trapped in my own body, unable to move due to the paralysis caused by my body rejecting the initial treatment, and my night nurses would often have to come and sit with me to keep me company at night after my mother fell asleep. We would speak in whispered tones about how the day had gone, my fears, my hopes, how much I appreciated all that they did. My apathy turned into gratitude as they would re-position my legs for me when they started to ache or when the nurses would bring me something to eat as a late-night snack to get the taste of nasty crushed medication out of my mouth. It was like my emotions were blossoming back into being.
The next major awakening came when my team came into my room one day to tell me that they had been looking over my last blood results and they believed that I should go ahead and apply for my PhD. I had been laying in bed for over two months, full aware that I had missed all of the application deadlines, but they brought a message of hope that I thought I would never hear. Of course, being paralysed, I still had a long way to go before I could really consider going abroad again, but I had my parents bring my computer in so that I could attempt to do some typing. Still, with all of the work that I had to do to re-learn how to swallow, speak, walk, and just generally function, I found that emotions such as happiness were still incredibly dulled, and a darkness had settled over me once more when I was transferred to rehab.
Once I was home, I resumed seeing my psychiatrist again. I told about how my emotions had disappeared, with slight peekings when something major happened to me. She responded by telling me that numbness is a coping mechanism that the brain implements in trauma. As with PTSD, which was my eventual diagnosis, general trauma in the moment can make your brain feel unsafe, and the experiencing of emotions can hinder physical recovery. In continuing trauma, such as battling cancer, the brain needs to focus on other functions in order to allow for the best chance of survival. It shuts down all 'unnecessary' functions in order to redirect power to the most base needs. This is one reason, I found out, why the doctors thought that my body started to shut down in the first place; I didn't need to be awake and alert to live, so my brain shut down those abilities in order to battle the cancer that was running through my blood.
Furthermore, the detachment can continue into your relationships; perhaps this is why I felt so disconnected from everyone during my treatment. Part of my decision to cut everyone off was because I didn't want people to see me struggling, didn't want to be overwhelmed with visitors, and didn't want to be the 'token sick friend'. But part of my brain realised that I couldn't expend the energy to maintain relationships while my body was in such a dangerous condition. To understand this reaction is to better understand the psychological web as a whole; every incident in your life will lead your brain to make decisions, and these decisions will almost always be out of self-preservation when it comes right down to it. This is why I found myself having violent flashbacks at home but only shaking and becoming slightly non-responsive while out and about -- my brain felt safe at home and in the doctor's office and allowed the flashbacks to take hold of me.
Dealing with numbness and PTSD, I imagine, is much like being out on a sailboat in turbulent waters; when you reach a dead calm, that it the time to be nervous. Those moments usually occur right before the floodgates open and the rain pours down, drowning you.
Slowly, I've regained my emotions to the point that I almost wish I was numb again. I had thought that having emotions back would feel like some glorious gift. I imagined that I would be happy and sad again, that I would be able to laugh and cry and love. While this is somewhat the case, I also find that I do deal with depressive episodes more than I had hoped. The return of emotions doesn't equate to being able to feel the way you did before you experienced severe trauma; rather, it simply means that you're able to feel the pain and joy of living that much more keenly. Now, when I reach for emotional responses, they're there, and often more dramatic than I would wish for them to be. But I suppose that re-learning proper emotional responses fits perfectly into the rest of my journey, and it makes me more aware of why I reached for a particular emotion in a particular circumstance, something that was simply a trained reaction before.
