Indeed, using a TikTok is lazy, but I’m getting all the juice out of my 5 year cancer-free tour. If the American Cancer Association thinks I don’t deserve one because being cancer-free for 5 years doesn’t mean you’re cancer free. They can honestly just suck mud. Through a straw.
But there really aren’t that many stops left on the 5 year tour, and after that? I’m not sure what I’m doing. But I’ll be walking away from my story, and leaving it in the past. I’ll carry a bit of trauma forward, and innumerable medical life lessons. I’m honestly torn between keeping up my studies and staying on top of the oncology world, or standing up and walking away. I’ve helped a lot of people. I’ve watched a lot of people die. A lot. Too many.
But I feel trapped by my health, in some bizzaro fashion that is the opposite of how my invalid self was captured by gravity itself. Now I am healthy. And the healthier I continue to become, the harder it seems to be to walk away.
But instead of this great renaissance I expected to see 5 years ago, I see a retreat away from science. The Man. Big Pharma. And I get it, because I did it before it was cool. That’s why I can’t really watch it now.
Most doctors are complete crap. Especially in oncology, they like to talk big to make you feel small or use big words where a tiny one would be easily understood. They do this on purpose, to be superior. I know all the tricks because I spent these years learning the language, the nuances, and the reasoning. I understood my (second) oncologist was a bad doctor, because she was actually a stupid person with no sense of responsibility stick in a job she didn’t deserve. She wasn’t evil or not wanting you to know things. She had less than a 50% average at showing up to work.
But I took that opportunity to learn her job and do it. But with that I took on the responsibility of knowing how badly she was harming her patients. It’s suffocating. But I don’t make the half a million a year she does to do nothing. I make nothing trying to run and out out all the fires.
It’s not sustainable. And I miss my old day-painting job.
Which is why I wrote my book. But Jesus, this portion is agonizingly slow. Proofing, beta readers. My husband is in charge of this, which I needed to reserve my sanity. But dude is sloooooow. But I spent 8 hours a day writing from September until May 1st. When I was done I was a traumatized ball of hate. Maybe I needed the time. But now, I need the freaking money 😅
The next big 5. August 29th- 5 years since I started Keytruda, in my head known as the first day in 2019 I stopped actively dying. I have very vivid memories of it.
I was 72 pounds. And I was smiling and pumping my bony fist in the air. People thought: that’s so sad. Doesn’t she know she’s going to die? That Keytruda is not a cure?
I sure didn’t. I believed it was a cure, because I was told so in an ICU delerium by one of the nurses that was on the hit TV show E.R.
That’s crazy. No. Anyone who saw me come back to life over the next 3 months actually SAW crazy.
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