Feeling

Yesterday I asked my sister, "How do you think I should be feeling?"

That's a pretty odd question.  In fact, I don't think that I've ever asked it before.  Why would I?  The answer that I would give to myself before I would even allow myself to ask it would be, "Who cares?"  Who cares how I should be feeling?  And, even more, who cares how anyone thinks I should be feeling?  Even an adored sibling.

But the thing is, yesterday I really wanted to know.  I had just had a meeting with my oncologist; we talked through the results of my latest scans and reviewed the directions for the latest step in my cancer journey.  I felt kind of numb.  Not sad.  Not especially excited to begin.  Not pessimistic.  Not not optimistic.  But not overly optimistic, at least nothing more than my pretty consistent expectation that cancer and I still have many (perhaps many, many) years ahead of us.

So there I was, eating dinner, digging for some feeling or another.  One thing that I recognized is that I'm a bit nervous about starting this drug, because you never know precisely what the side effects will be like.  Then I realized this: I'm going to start taking a drug, and I'm nervous about its side effects. Period.  It's a feeling, and a pretty normal one.  And it doesn't need to carry with it the prefix: I-have-cancer-and-I'm-gonna-die.  

So we ate a fabulous dinner and then we went to a fabulous show and I went home and went to bed. Just like a normal person who happens to have cancer.