Positively Phoebe

After my cancer treatment ended, I felt AWAKE.  I felt newly alive and filled with gratitude and wonder and love and calm.  I felt like a better person.  I felt inspired and believed people when they said they felt inspired by me.   Now I feel like I have lost every bit of whatever I gained from that experience.   Now I feel defective and unfixable.  I am w racked with guilt, constantly unable to talk myself out of thoughts that I have ruined Ryan’s life and destroyed the confident, invincible man he was before my illness.  I feel hopeless that this cystitis will never be fixed or that the longer it takes, the more broken I will become in the process and the harder it will be to bounce back if I am EVER able to.     And I feel alone.  It’s easy to support someone going through cancer.  It’s something everyone is familiar with and understands.  But once you’re “cured,” that is all some people can see.  They expect you to be all jubilant and healthy and my reality is – that’s over.  The

Every time I have a few free moments to sit down and update the blog, I feel like 62 things have happened that I need to address here.  Half the time, this realization makes the task of updating so daunting that I just blow it off entirely.  Today, I feel like I at least need to try to suck it up and get some things out. I should start with the fact that the phone call with biopsy results that I was promised 2-4 days after the surgery never came and so a full *WEEK* later, I called to find out what was going on.  A few hours later, Dr. Avellone's nurse, Hayley, called me back to tell me that the biopsy results were negative.  Which I already knew on some level, but was glad to hear "officially".  Now it's just a matter of waiting for the biopsies and cauterization to heal and see if I feel any better.  As of right now, going on three weeks later, I don't.  Still in pretty significant pain most days.  Still have to pee 10-20 times a day.  Hayley said that they ha

Well, all my anesthesia fears were for naught, not that I didn't know that on some level going into it all yesterday.  In retrospect, I'm pretty sure the worst part of the anesthesia bit is the vague memory of attempting to make some sort of idiotic joke about how much crap was in the OR when they wheeled me in there, clearly on my way to loopy-town but not quite knocked fully out yet.  When seemed like a just a moment later, I woke up in recovery.  And because Todd and Lacey had fully prepared me for this part, I was unshaken by the fact that I was randomly crying for no reason.   I was in a lot of pain, and the nurse gave me Morphine, which did nothing, then Demerol, which made me sleep for an unknown amount of time, and then Morphine again.  Eventually I was rolled into a little discharge room and they brought Ryan and my mum in to see me.  I'm almost glad I was still a little woozy because being fully aware while the nurse explained to me AND RYAN how to empty and chang