Something old, something new.

School has been back in session for a week now. I am trying to avoid answering questions about the break because I am so glad to see people again that I tend to overshare about how it all went. Ok, perhaps my lack of appropriate boundaries or internal monologue are the reasons why I overshare, but the issue remains the same: I'd rather be at work.

The shocking discovery this summer that I am actually more extroverted than I'd ever suspected (What?? I LIKE people???) was confirmed again over the Winter Break. I timed the operation so as not to interfere with school, which remains good reasoning in my mind, and there were people around while I was here so that I was not utterly cut off from human contact. There were some very pleasant hours, in fact. Christmas Eve was spent with friends and their newborn, and I had Christmas dinner with a lovely bunch of colleagues- and another newborn, as it happens. It wasn't great having Annie away, though, and I was certainly aware of my solitary status- uncomfortably so.

The visit to the surgeon was on Christmas Eve, and as you know, contained all good news. Seven months after him telling me that I 'could' have cancer, he was smugly affirming that the margins were now clear, and admiring the bandage that I'd put on over the drain; he even suggested that I could come and work for him. Ah, how far we've come.
We shook hands solemnly when I departed, and I pointed out that it was the last time I'd see him. 'Come back anytime you want!' he exclaimed. Which was nice. And a little odd.

The Herceptin treatment on Boxing Day was as standard as it could be. I gave the oncologist and the cancer ward techies some candy canes, and all the next appointments were made without incident. I wasn't as knocked flat by this treatment as the one on Thanksgiving, so was able to... Lord, I can't remember what I did afterwards on Boxing Day! The action and adventure is so non stop, that I clearly can't keep track of it all. I may have gone to buy some new dishes or something. I have some new dishes, and obviously I got them somehow. Maybe that's when I picked them up.

The next evening I left for Bali. Again, a completely non-eventful departure and journey. The airport in Denpasar has undergone huge renovations,  but the queues were horrendous- far worse than I'd seen them before. It honestly wasn't until I was standing in one that it occurred to me that it was just two years ago that I was honeymooning there. At that point, surrounded by all the laughing twenty-somethings and couples and families, I made the first of my New Year's resolutions:

I will never honeymoon in Bali again.

Seems reasonable, and pretty easy to keep. It was not the last resolution of the week.

The driver, Surya, was waiting for me outside the gates. Feels like we go way back now, as he drives for me whenever I go. We toddled out to the villa and he left me there with instructions to rest and relax for the next two days, and that he'd pick me up in time for dinner on Monday evening. Rest? Relax?

By the end of the first day I was twitching. I have never been very good at resting.

Actually, let's take that whole rather long, dull story and make it short, shall we? Bali is beautiful. I did not have a great time, however. I think, in honesty, that the break may have pushed me near the edge of a place I don't want to visit- and I am not talking about Indonesia. Blame the medication, perhaps, or the (still very recent) hysterectomy, or the fact that it has been a pretty flipping tough year. Whatever it is- yikes. It shouldn't be a surprise that things are a struggle at the moment, should it? The hormone issues on their own would be enough to excuse a certain amount of... Lord, what is this?

I have the attention span of a cocker spaniel. Even typing this entry has taken me three days so far, and I'd planned to submit it as soon as I returned from Bali. I am constantly anxious. My heart seems jittery, and loud noises are intensely irritating- not great when working with middle schoolers. I remain hurt and saddened by a failed relationship that I ought to have recovered from by this time. I am so pleased to see people that I talk over top of them in my enthusiasm, and can sense them pulling away. My moods are all over the place- I can be giggling inappropriately one minute and sobbing the next. I either sleep for ten hours or three and a half. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat; when I wake up again, it is in a hot flash. If this is all down to the cancer treatment, then fine- but I would love to know that it will pass!

On the plus side, my hair looks great. Whether I will keep it this short, I do not know.

Radiation treatment starts Tuesday. I went in on Thursday for a CT scan and to get some bright blue grid marks mapped out all over my chest, with the instructions not to remove them. I am trying, honestly, but they are all wearing off regardless of my best efforts. The radiologist has told me that I will have thirty-three treatments, as opposed to the twenty I was scheduled for the last time they'd planned them. Also, each treatment will take twenty minutes, and not the five he'd indicated last time. I'll just show up, I think, and they'll let me go when I'm finished. The good thing about the radiation is that I can pop along at my convenience. Well, and that it will keep the cancer from coming back. That will also be a good thing.

It all should be wrapped up, then, the first week in March. There really is no way that I'm going to keep those grid marks in place until then! I guess that once it's all finished, I won't have any excuse to continue writing this. Life will return to a wonderful normality, whatever that will now look like. In another few months, Annie will be heading off to university (if the little minx ever gets her UCAS forms completed), and I'll be here waiting out the next year, hopefully with a new job nicely underway. What happens after that is anybody's guess. All the plans I've been making have been quite decisively thrown out the window, so it feels foolish to pick up and make many new ones now.

I guess I'm just adrift at the moment, trying to get used to the changes in my system and the crazy shifts in the path. Things will settle down; things will become clearer. I hate hearing my constant complaints- and they are louder inside my head, believe me. I received word this week that a very good friend from college died from breast cancer on the second of January. A few months my junior, we met when I transferred to Moncton during my third year. She made the last year and a half of my degree a far more pleasant place to be. She was simply a wonderful human being, and I do not understand the vagaries of a universe that allows someone as lovely and necessary as she was to suffer so much more, let alone not live, when I have emerged so unscathed. No bullshit here about how there's a bigger plan afoot for me, or that I have been spared for a reason. It feels like a lottery- a big, cosmically perverse lottery.