Last MRI of 2013

My neuro oncologist is starting to sound like a broken record. "Your scan looks great. No change or tumor regrowth. We expect you to live a long life. See you in four months."

You may now commence with the appropriate post-MRI celebrations. It takes me a while to shake off the pre-MRI anxiety, and it takes me even longer to figure out how to be happy about those words. "We expect you to live a long life." A long life is good, but a long life of regularly scheduled anxiety and unexpected bouts of depression is hard to take sometimes. And it turns out that I am totally one to look a gift horse right in the mouth. This gift I've been given, this gift of not succumbing to the brain cancer, of not dying in the 18-24 months that is statistically more likely than living even the four years that I have since my diagnosis, this gift is sometimes a horse with very bad teeth, one that needs a Costco size tube of Crest toothpaste and a dentist with a magic wand in the form of a giant, never-ending bottle of Ativan.

It's not that I'm not thankful for what I have. I really, truly am. Sometimes, it is so hard to see past the glaring absence of the parts of my life that will always be missing--things like piece of mind and normalcy. Yes, I get to keep my life and I get to keep on living it, but it's broken. I'm broken. And I don't know how to fix myself right now.

I wish I could celebrate with you today. I wish I could simply say to myself, well that was nice. Everything is exactly how it should be. But I feel scattered and lost and afraid and confused today, and all of those things put together add up to angry and sad.