It's Baaack...

Well crap. Back to surgery tomorrow. I’d been cancer free for almost a year-and-a-half, but the last test in mid-October showed cancer cells floating around my urine. TMI, possibly, for which I apologize. I’m not sure what the implications of this are, and I’ve been resisting going on the internet to check. There’s so much misinformation and half-truth there, and I’m neither knowledgeable nor skillful enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Five years ago, I remember going to a site that stated with certainty that my condition would lead to death within weeks or months. This was not helpful since my oldest sister died from this form of cancer, as did one of my very best friends.
This will be the 15th or 16th procedure. I’ve frankly lost count. I’m particularly concerned this time because my doctors couldn’t identify the source(s) of the bad cells, so this surgery will be largely exploratory.
As luck would have it, I ran into a friend this morning that has had her own battle with the disease, and we commiserated for a while on the difficulty of explaining one’s emotions to people who haven’t faced cancer. The illness, for the most part, is beatable nowadays, and treatments are far more effective than they were even a decade ago. But these treatments are debilitating and dehumanizing, while the implications of the very word remain somehow huge and dark. It is, my friend said, “the gift that keeps on giving.” One can never quite get rid of the knowledge that something deadly has tried to take over, and that it is a very patient invader.
A long time ago, I wrote about the fight and likened it to white-hat good guys and black-hat villains having at it in the internal geography of my body. It’s a fierce fight. So far, my white-hat guys are winning. I do hope they have a couple more victories in them.