I'm okay (except for when I'm not)

After 8 months of treatment, including 6 weeks of chemoradition, a open thoracotomy removing 2/3 of my lung, another 6 weeks of chemo thrown in because hair is for suckers, and a targeted therapy that is as potentially miraculous as it is expensive, I am currently living with Schrodinger's Cancer. My last two scans showed two small but "suspicious" spots - one in my remaining lobe and one in my brain. 

There's a concept in Canadian criminal law of a "reasonable suspicion", a standard that's meant to keep police from exercising their formidable powers all willy-nilly and has clearly been a success in every way and HEY LOOK OVER THERE

There's a similar concept in healthcare. As one can imagine, the patient's idea of "reasonable suspicion" is often much broader because we're a teeny-tiny bit more invested what with the life-being-at-stake thing. "Rare", "unlikely", "improbable" - these are nonsense words to me now. 30,000 Canadians get diagnosed with lung cancer every year, and all but 600 of them are over the age of 50. Do not tell me the odds. 

And so my first instinct is that the word "suspicious" is suspicion enough. I want the full-scale response. I want the cancer swat team all over again and I want them to do their job properly this time because goddammit I did not go through all that for nothing!

But the oncologists, who actually do this for what I hope is a very good living, want more evidence before subjecting me to more "all that"  because I am still recovering from the previous rounds of "all that" and it would be both a waste of resources and pretty damn harmful to the patient to do "all that" when those spots could just be inflammation or blood vessels or scarring or spider eggs. ("Please, let it be spider eggs in my brain" has got to be near the top of the list of Things-Floyd-Thought-She'd-Never-Say). 

So I try to get through each day, waiting for the next scan, the next test. I sleep more. I cry a lot. I take a lot of pills for a lot of reasons. I spend hours online, gathering my own evidence: reading medical journals, attending virtual conferences, connecting with other patients through social media, trying to figure out whether I should be planning my life in months, years or decades. 

Motivational Poster for Cancer Cells

And the longer I live with this, the more I'm coming to understand that it is always Schrodinger's Cancer. There will always be a "next scan" as long as I'm alive.

Because that cancer, it is crafty. It can hide and hibernate. It can deke and dip and dodge whatever gets thrown at it: toxic chemotherapy, T-cells pumped up by immunotherapy, therapies targeted to its specific genetic makeup, razor sharp scalpels that take healthy tissue along with the malignant.  

It is endlessly malleable, relentlessly innovative, and ultimately self-defeating because, do you not understand that if I die, you die too? Huh? Didja think about that, smarty-cells? DIDJA?!?#$&%

And it's why no question stops me in my tracks faster than "How are you?" Because I am Schrodinger's Cancer Patient: I am healing; I am dying. I am cured; I am terminal. I should take up new hobbies; I should give away my belongings. I should make plans with friends; I should make funeral plans. 

I'm okay, except for when I'm not.