The Other Mountain: Life After Cancer Diagnosis

The first part of any journey is taking the first step.  Right?  Maybe that’s the scariest step for most people.  Starting.  I know that I balked and got angry talking to God about starting another book.

I like to write.  Always have.  Like so many I have enjoyed a good story since I was little.  I used to come up with these crazy stories in my middle school years, most of which no one, not even my sister, has ever heard about.  I spent hours illustrating parts of them.

But I’ve never self-identified as a writer.  Even though I literally write something every day now.  Poems, fiction plots and blog ideas, talks I might give.  My conversations with God.

Writing my first book has been like climbing a very steep, very scary mountain.  When I first talked with God about following through on my book ideas it was so scary to me I got mad.  Anger seems safer than fear sometimes.   

Stepping out, I wrote a book outline.  It still seemed ridiculous.  Me writing a book.  A whole book.  Sure, I’ve started like 5 or 6, but how is a mother of 5 kiddos supposed to find time to write?  For real and not just for fun?

Isn’t it crazy?  Here I am, one year later having written an entire inspirational non-fiction manuscript in 1 and 2 hour chunks.  God meeting me in my broken days and redeeming my broken dreams.

One.  Small.  Problem.

Climbing to the top of this particular mountain has been a miracle.  Several miracles maybe: 1 – I’m alive to write; 2 – Each and every week that I was able to get out of the house to write for a few hours; 3 – God helping me organize my thoughts and providing the insights to record in a book.  In climbing this mountain there have been several points along the way I stopped to look back and admire the view, and then I was there!  At the top!

    
I had to climb through a bit of fog at times, common in climbing to such a high peak.  Foggy steps moving upward and closer to my goal were still energizing.  My feelings at the summit when I had written the final words.  Placed the final period.  Indescribable. 

    
Having been watching my feet through the fog so I wouldn’t miss a step, I finally looked up.

    
What. On. Earth?

   
This wasn’t the top at all.  How come I didn’t know that this wasn’t the top of the mountain?

I climbed a really long way.  It was an incredible journey.  But crap.  I thought this climb WAS the mountain. 

    
Yeah, I climbed from sea level to base camp. 

    
The climb up that mountain?  It begins from here.

    
It felt crazy to begin a book I knew I would finish.  Scary.  But I really didn’t know scary until I finished my climb to base camp.  Until I printed my manuscript and saw what I really needed to do to turn my manuscript into a book.

    
Getting to what I thought was the top but was really base camp, that realization of the largeness of the true climb, reminded me of when I finished treatment for breast cancer.  Only minus the whole chemo and surgery and radiation recovery thing.

    
Being diagnosed with cancer is like being invited to climb a mountain too.   Only it’s like THIS and you are running up a steep slope while being mauled by a mountain lion.  I have loved this post ever since I discovered it back during my own treatment.  The analogy is so apt, especially that part where at the end people are like, “Wow, you are finished!”  Only you stand there beaten and bleeding.

    
There is another mountain to climb.  The mountain of recovery from treatment for you and your family.  The mountain of daily living with horrible side effects from treatment.  The mountain of recovering your energy and stamina.  I think I lay at that base camp of ‘Thank God I finished and I don’t think I can take even one more step forward’ for 2 or 3 years.

    
At which point I was diagnosed with heart failure from my breast cancer treatment.  Which was helpful because it gave a name for the fatigue and general feeling of being mauled.  Not so helpful in actually getting me up that mountain peak.  That second summit called “Thriving After Cancer Treatment.”  Or something like that.

    
So here I am at base camp again.  Only for a book this time.  The initial journey was much more peaceful :).  But it’s still a place of recouping and looking up.  The mountain looks so, just, high from here.  I don’t know that I have what it takes to climb.  I’m afraid.  Afraid of starting out and failing.  Of falling.  I hate to fall.

    
Will God catch me when I fall?  Again?  I will only find out if I get off my cot, put on my big girl boots and climb.

Heart Failure: Living with Failure and Loving It

In October it will 2 years since I officially became a failure.  Just in case I wasn’t sure.  If I ever need a reminder I just need to check any medical document about me.

It’s weird to have this thing, failure, hanging over me.  Weird and liberating too.  The scars on my heart won’t just disappear on their own, barring a miracle.  I was reading up on heart failure in preparation for my cardiology appointment last Friday and one site had the NYHA heart failure classifications listed as “The Stages of Dying”. 

Nice.  Thanks for putting it that way.

But.  Wait a minute.  Isn’t that what we are all doing anyway?  Aren’t we all dying?  At 38 years old most people would not look at it that way; but between breast cancer and heart failure, the idea that if you try hard, work out, eat healthy, and are generally a “good” person, you will live to 90 seems sort of ridiculous. 

People, myself included, spend a lot of energy making sure that our life looks good from the outside.  But no matter how hard I try, no matter how many workouts or organic broccoli spears I eat I have completely failed at good health.  I feel like it isn’t my fault, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if it was my fault or not, does it? 

Becoming acquainted with the truth of my failure to be perfect has been painful.  Sometimes I feel like a burden on my family, especially financially.  Sometimes I feel like, why try to be a better, healthier person if it doesn’t really make a difference?  But truly God has just revealed the truth about myself, maybe a bit more clearly than is comfortable.

Sometimes when I walk slowly up the stairs carrying nothing I get out of breath.  And I get reminded that God breathes on our soul to bring us to life.  I get reminded that I am not in charge of whether or not I wake up in the morning.  I am not in charge, well, of basically anything important.  But I can decided to be loving to the people in my life.  And, am in charge of my attitude about my failure to be perfect.

It’s been about a year since I went off heart medication.  On two medications and with some IV iron treatments at the Cancer Center my heart function bounced back close to what it was before chemo.  It seemed,honestly, like a miracle.  But the medication dropped my blood pressure really low, too low, and I felt sick and dizzy every day for almost 9 months.  Not a fun way to live.

So, an experiment: would my heart function hold without medication?

Yeah.  Nope.  Not really.

An echocardiogram done the beginning of September showed a measure of my heart function (ejection fraction for those of you medically inclined) dropped back down to 50%.  Ejection fraction (EF) is this complicated thing that I won’t get into but essentially it’s like this: 100% means your heart squeezed out all the blood, literally wringing itself out.  This is bad.  0% means your heart isn’t beating at all.  This is bad.  A healthy person’s EF is a range of normal, 55%-75%, mostly looking at normal for you. 

My EF was a great 65% before chemo.  The lowest recorded drop was to 40-45%.  It makes the best sense, to me at least, to say my heart function dropped about 25%, this is bad, sometime during my pregnancy or birth of my son.  After medication it was back up to 61%!  Great!

Now I am back down to an EF of 50%, a drop of about 11% from when I was on medication, or I lost about 1/6 of my heart function.  My cardiologist swears that I shouldn’t be able to feel the effects, but I’m sorry, if I reduced your heart’s ability to oxygenate your body by 1/6 you’d feel it too.  Mostly it’s like getting out of breath or tired from stupid tasks that shouldn’t make you do so.

So basically I’m a failure at climbing stairs and bending over to pick up toys.  But that’s ok.  Because I suck at other things too.  Admitting I’m a failure, having this truth about myself be inescapable is a liberating God thing.  Why try to hide from God what is naked to His eyes?  Why try to pretend with you that I have it all put together when the truth is so different?

Josh and I decided with my cardiologist to not go back on medication unless my heart function drops more.  Maybe it will never drop more.  Maybe there will be new medications discovered.  But, what a crazy invitation from God: trust Him with my life and breath.  Trust Him instead of worrying and stressing about daily life.  Every heart beat belongs to Him.  Whether or not anyone knows anything of me but failure and my sins.  Love, belongs to Him.  Comes from Him.

And truly, the best invitation: that today could be my last day on Earth, my last chance to Love.  Am I going to waste it?

Living with failure, and loving it.