Real.

Cancer just got real over the past few days. My hair starting falling in the shower....cancer finally feels real. Explain that to me? Its been two months since my emergency surgery, I've been to many doctor's appointments and had my first chemo and still as encouraging notes and hugs poured in I've been feeling like this is a mistake. I still thought somehow this was wrong, this wasn't my life/my body/my reality.

I stood in the shower for a long time looking at the clumps of hair in my hands. I'm not scared of being bald, some of the most beautiful women I have seen were bald, but something about your hair coming out of your head effortlessly is so unnatural and wrong. The sarcoma group I joined online told me people usually lost their hair around the two week point after their first dose of doxorubicin. Red devil indeed (the drug's nickname for the horrible effects it has on your body). It sounds like people loose ALL their hair - including nose hairs! Who would have thought...

I vacillate between feelings of how lucky I am to be alive/ supported by an incredible community/ able to work/ able to share the journey and feeling pissed that I got dealt this hand. In more lucid moments I'm grateful for all the incredible things life has given me so far - family and friends/ travel/ work experiences that I have loved/ education/ creativity and then there are the moments of fear and sadness about what I am missing out on simply being a young adult cancer survivor.

The hardest part I think is just recognizing you can't do everything like you did before...it's a sobering reality.  This morning I woke up to more weird side effects - bleeding gums again, pain everywhere and hair coming out every time I touch my head and what looked like a blood blister under the new scar down my abdomen from the surgery (they think it's just part of the healing process). The doctor said bleeding gums could just be from flossing and taking meds in the same day, the pain is just part of the chemo attacking my cells and probably just the stress/emotions of it all...or a little bug.

Today I stayed in my recliner all day. Everything hurt. I keep reminding myself that everyday won't be like this, and hasn't been like this. Today is just a rough one. I watched a trailer for a new tv show called Chasing Life coming out in June about a woman who gets diagnosed with cancer.  I hope they make it real - the aches and pain, fatigue, chemo and hair loss. The trailer just looked pretty. We'll see.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.