Coming back from a doctor appointment recently, I drove into a landscape painting, the sky pale blue and dotted with fluffy white clouds. It was somewhat surreal, the utter stillness, but also peaceful as though the stillness was a pause, a moment to catch one’s breath, maybe also to inhale some lilac and peony before life’s chaos continued. 

Those moments are more difficult to see as I enter the slog of the midpoint. Yes, yes, I’m halfway done with those pills. Now, I can both see the end and dread it, as I have been warned. It’s a thing – some kind of a thing – to take a poison dose every day in hopes that it will kill something else that’s worse. It’s another thing to stop taking that poison and know that there’s nothing fighting anymore. 

My oncology therapist warned me during one of our conversations that it can be scary to cross the highwire that is life without those terrible pills. I was feeling some sort of way about feeling sick ALL THE TIME to prevent myself from being sick. She was right, of course, as her years of experience could have told me. I do feel anxious about removing the chemo net from my highwire life. What if the scans – every three months thank you very much – don’t catch it soon enough when it inevitably returns? What if my remission lasts until after the regular scans end? What if? What if? What if?

But we can’t live like that, of course. I crested the hill and started the downward leg of my chemo journey on Memorial Day; and in a week, the day after I watch my youngest graduate from high school, I’ll get my first CT and MRI scans. The therapist and I have already talked about my upcoming scan-xiety – that anxiety that arrives the eve of the scans and lasts through the reading of the results. Having waited for and waded through a lot of tests and results, I’ve experienced scan-xiety. I even still get it with every blood test, my heart working harder as I check my white blood cell count and my tumor markers. 

The anxiety fades as the results come in, even the cancer result didn’t cause more anxiety. Once the test confirmed what we suspected, instead of feeling anxious, I felt … resolve, perhaps, determination to fight. The determination is still there but the slog, the deadly slog of daily poisonings is tedious. The continuing battle against cramps, diarrhea, stomach upset, mouth sores is wearisome, to say the least. 

This is more acknowledgement than complaint. I’m beyond grateful for the tech who spotted that anomalous lesion on my liver, for the people who made it possible for me to take a handful of pills twice a day to extend my life, for the people who help me traverse that highwire even with the net currently in place. BUT some days, when the energy is so low that I spend the day lying on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling while a podcast or audiobook plays softly next to my ear, I think about the woman who spent last spring preparing for a hike. Where the hell is she right now? Definitely not hiking.