Change in the weather

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When we first came to New Zealand years ago, we were amazed at how much people talk about the weather here. You’ll find blogs from years ago marking our surprise about this. One of the common explanations is that we were used to “continental weather” and not “island weather.” Continental weather rolls across big land masses and is more predictable and more stable (though try telling that to the folks in Atlanta this week). Island weather is pushed around over the sea where strange things happen to weather and so it changes faster and less predictably than continental weather. This is a place where a southerly gale in the morning can be followed by a northerly gale in the same afternoon.

Turns out that cancer means that my internal weather is island weather. While the overall patterns tend to sunny and warm, the dark clouds can blow in without warning; sometimes the gales are ferocious, and sometimes the fog is impenetrable.  Last night I fell asleep thinking about how helpful it was to have such hormone receptive cancer—get rid of estrogen (its food) and it starves. Awesome.

This morning I woke to emails about the side effects of starving the rest of your body of estrogen: early menopause, depression, brain fog, heart problems, early onset Alzheimer’s. Ghastly. It’s as if the female body has the sense that without estrogen, it’s time to pack up and move on. The fog closed in.

I am finding that my sadness has different qualities. I am more often near tears than I ever have been; I find that sometimes a phrase catches unexpectedly in my throat and my eyes overflow almost without my noticing. Generally it is a rich and full sadness, woven through with joy and loss and delight and beauty. A poignant and bittersweet love for life even though we are all going to leave this spectacular place at some point. More rarely—but still regularly, alas—the sadness thins and becomes brittle and won’t associate with joy. It becomes dementor sadness that sucks the joy out and won’t allow other emotions to live alongside it.  This I guess would be despair. I hate the things that well up with despair.

I hate that when Aidan was writing his obligatory essay about what he did on his summer vacation, he had to ask me what stage my cancer is. I hate that it hurts to sleep. I hate that my body is unfamiliar to me now. I hate that a snide remark from a teenage girl can send me into tears, fleeing the dinner table. I hate the green tea I am drinking religiously. I hate that the walk to Melissa’s leaves me so weary. I hate that I can’t yet lift the cast iron skillet. I hate that I had to cancel three months of work I was excited about. I hate that a quarter of us will die from the bizarre quirk of cells that don't remember to die themselves. There is so much to hate about cancer.

Dr Servan-Schereiber (who wrote Anticancer) talks about how despair feeds cancer, and I can say that the feeling is mutual. At each new piece of news, I can feel my perspective narrow as the fog settles in and hides the bigger landscape. At first that fog was, in addition to miserable, also terrifying because I thought maybe it would settle in for a while. Now I’ve seen the weather come and go and I know that the fog of despair is as temporary as it is unflinchingly bleak. Each round now contains the weight of the other rounds, but it also contains the clear memory that it’s temporary. But when the despair is here, I am lost for a little while before I am found.

And God help the person who walks in and tries to cheer me up right then (sorry to those of you who have tried so lovingly). This is a time for hunkering in to join me under the cloud cover and cuddling against the chill, not a time to try and change the atmosphere or convince me it's not so bad. Later I’ll be able to listen to reason and solicit data and stories (solicitation request below). In the fog I just want a hand to hold through the misery that looks, temporarily, endless.

And then the wind blows and the rain howls and the picture might stay dark, but it begins pulsing with other possibilities. Tonight it would help me make sense of my bewildering landscape if any of my sisters in breast cancer will either comment below or email me about the role of the estrogen blockers (whether you went with tamoxifen or surgery or an aromatase inhibitor) in your life (mood? brain power? sex life? sense of joy?). This morning I couldn’t have heard your stories in the deafening silence of the fog. Tonight I crave them in the slanting light of sunset. Tonight I am as in touch with the things I love about my life as the things I hate.

I love that it will never be January 2014 again. I love that I get messages from people all around the world who tell me that I’ve made a difference in their lives and that people pray for me in at least half a dozen languages. I love that I fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves. I love that Aidan reads me Harry Potter when I lie down for my nap. I love the foam in my coffee in the morning. I love that Dolce curls up next to me as I type and moves into my lap if I cry. I love the taste of a fresh tomato when I eat it warm in my garden. I love that Michael loves me a little more now that I have cancer than he did before (and he loved me a lot then). I love that Melissa saw a pod of dolphins while she was waiting for my plane to land yesterday. I love that Naomi and I both took pictures of the sunset tonight—from my bedroom—and then compared them with the pictures we have taken at sunset the last two nights to decide which night was the most beautiful (it was a draw). I love that I feel more alive than I did in December.

The sunsets are more beautiful on a cloudy evening, and they get more beautiful as the light fades. These are just some things you discover about the beauty and mystery of the weather pattern here on this peculiar island of mine…