Emotional Roller Coaster

The next couple of days after discovering I had cancer were a blur, so much happening all at once. I was sore from the surgery and could barely get around the house so I was confined to being stuck inside and was confronted with mostly processing all the emotions in my head. I am typically a person who is in constant motion. I am master at multitasking and have prided myself on the ability to have a dozen things going at once. This has somehow always been my nature. I am very patient and don’t really need instantaneous gratification and this is what makes me great at juggling so many things at the same time. My years of working the darkroom had given me a calmness to wait and work towards perfection. The old process of printing took hours and days just to create a single image. The calm in the darkness, with the gentle motion of the water in the trays waiting, watching for an image to emerge could take up to 15 minutes per print. It has given me the ability to take my time to get to a final result, to see the goal, and can keep on target. I think I am a person of extraordinary vision and research all angles and possibilities of that vision. So being stationary dealing with something I knew little about and not having enough information was excruciating. As the results came back and the overall picture become clear of what I was actually dealing with I began to research everything I could about the process and what my realistic expectations should be. I believe knowledge is the greatest power we have in confronting our fears. Each day felt like a frantic race with time. Within a few days I met with an Oncologist, though we knew it was Lymphoma we still didn’t know how far it had progressed. The treatment was the same for whatever stage, and the concern from the rapid growth in the beginning, we decided to jump right into Chemotherapy the next day. So the next morning I went directly from a CAT scan to identify the stage of progression directly into Chemo using the same IV. It all moved so quickly, I could barely really process what was actually happening and it felt my life had become a roller coaster. Here I was at the prime of my life, the physical shape I have ever been. It was like the lights and the darks of an image, the image of my life were beginning to blend, separate, become a contradiction of form and functions as I raised my face to the unknown universe that had provided me such life from birth and now delivered me to such uncertainty. Yet all I could make out was the figure of myself standing naked, alone, in the darkness searching for hope and light.

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