Cancer is one of those things that comes into your life and then completely turns it upside down. One day you're plugging along, and the next day you suddenly find yourself immersed in a new world – the world of cancer.
My life became all about appointments, needle sticks, lab reports to anxiously wait for, tough decisions and learning as much about breast cancer as I could. Then once the tough decisions were made my life became about chemo, Penguin cold caps (to try and save my hair), Herceptin, hormone therapy, more tests and laying on the couch a lot feeling miserable and depressed. Two weeks ago I had a mastectomy to remove my left breast (the culprit in all of this) and have started the reconstruction process.
I'm far from "out of the woods" and just feel kind of stunned and confused. What the hell just happened to me?
I feel like I will never be able to go back to my Old World - my world before breast cancer. I'm not the same person anymore. While on the one hand it's exciting to stand on the edge of a New World , it's also scary. Old World was familiar, but this New World stands before me undefined. It's like a wide open field with no clear path, and to be honest I feel lost and alone.
The hardest part is that people who haven't been through it just don't get it. Not that I blame them, of course. I can't expect them to know what they don't know.
Besides the obvious scars I will always have now cancer has left a permanent imprint on my life and it will never be the same.
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