veggies.jpg“My intellectual work, I now know, is an outgrowth of the life I’ve led. It has transformed whatever traumas I’ve survived into something useful for myself, and I hope, for others. My work has changed my life. My life has changed my work. … I know that my work must be accomplished in the face of uncertainty and chaos, when instability threatens to engulf me, to spin me out of control, for only then will I achieve a clarity of vision that comes when I try to integrate my life’s work with my life. … Now, and not later, I will try to understand.” Louise deSalvo, Vertigo

Why am I continuing to write this blog now that my terrifying “really bad brush with breast cancer story” has come to a happy ending? Perhaps I should stop writing. But I am not ready to stop writing about this – either my own experience, or what I have learned about the terrifying “facts” of breast cancer and the not unrelated gruesome details of the pink politics of breast cancer cash, the cancerocracy, and the misuse of breast cancer by major corporations to brand their products to the boomer generation with those fucking ribbons.

Breast cancer does not ever disappear, nor is it “cured.” And we are living in the midst of an epidemic of breast cancer. Cancer’s return overshadows life itself. Yesterday a friend sent me an article about the relationship between daily consumption of vegetables and “cancer’s return.” What blew me away about the article is not that an excess of vegetable consumption is unrelated to breast cancer survival, but that within time elapsed in the five-year study, a whopping 10% of the study participants had died – and these were “women who had been treated successfully for early-stage breast cancer.” Holy shit. 10% of early-stage, success stories of breast cancer treatment have died after five years, and we are supposed to be thinking about vegetable consumption? What is wrong with this picture?

All I can think about when I wake up is – it just takes one rogue cell — yeah I know that I am not being the compliant happy heroic figure of my own tragedy. But that is all it takes for metastatic cancer to set up shop in the other places breast cancer likes to live – about 25% ea for bones, lungs, liver and brain. And my life, or at least prognostically speaking, hangs on the competence of the guy who reviewed my pathology specimens. And they don’t look at it all, of course. They just look at slices.

That’s the thing about cancer. Well, one of the things. It’s never over. No sooner do they tell you about the pathology report, then in the next breath is information about recurrence.

I wish I could be more cheerful today and celebrate the happy news about my pathology report. I am supposed to feel like I have been handed my fresh new identity card for a “second life”. But actually, there is no second life. There is just this life. And I have work to do, now, with this life that I inhabit. And so I will keep writing. I will write to save my life — as if writing might save this life. As deSalvo articulates so beautifully, “Now, and not later, I will try to understand.”