It's June second … when in the hell did that happen??!? AND WHY ARE THERE SO MANY SPIDERS OUT NOW. FML.
There's two things I want to talk about in this post: my birthday and my dad.
Right around this time of year is particularly hard for me emotionally. I don't do well with aging. In fact, I absolutely hate it. To the point that if vampires were real and they weren't like that garbage-vomit-inducing Twilight incarnation, you can bet your sweet potatoes that I would be first in line to turn. The thought of reaching age 30 makes my skin crawl. Sure I have 3 years and 14 days before that happens, just I've felt that way since I was young. The thought of being 30 actually causes panic attacks in me sometimes. No, seriously. Wide awake at night-unable to turn off my brain-haven't slept in 8 days-kind of panic attacks.
I feel like I have accomplished nothing, that I haven't truly lived yet. It comes back to that “two spirits one body” thing I talked about in the last post; an introverted extrovert, or an extroverted introvert... I can't decide which one is more like me than the other, but nonetheless that's me.
What I wouldn't give to do college over again! I would be a better student and party 24-7. Maybe 18-6 cause I need a rest day, sleep, and a chance to study...but you get what I am saying. There was so much more I wanted to do but my social anxiety and depression kept me from it. So to all of my college friends, well those of you I still keep in contact with, I wasn't a flake, just had some mental health issues plaguing me. (I may repeat that a lot just because I am hoping to reach all of them)
I know I can't go back, I know I can only go forward, but I wouldn't mind it if going forward went at a snails pace, haha.
To make matters worse, my dad's pet scan didn't come back with an A+ score. For those of you who don't know, my father went in for an emergency biopsy last Christmas for formations inside his neck. As it turned out he had/has cancer in his neck and tongue. What an awesome Christmas gift to him and our family... I spent most of the spring taking him back and forth to radiation and chemotherapy appointments, I think it was 32 treatments in all.. maybe less, maybe more. I can't really remember it's all kind of a blur. Oh except for that time during chemotherapy he had a bad reaction to the needle, passing out and convulsing like he was having a seizure. That'll stick in the brain until I die.
To bring us up to last Friday, we met with his doctor to find out the results of his first pet scan post treatment. This is a normal thing they do just to compare how the cancer looked before and how it looked after responding to the treatment. No, a pet scan isn't one of your dog or cat, they inject a radioactive isotope in to his blood stream and then run him through a scanner to get a better image of his insides.
The results were both good and bad. The cancer in his neck and tongue have responded well to his treatment but the scan also showed something else: three formations on the right side of his chest. Now the doctor didn't say for certain that these were cancerous growths, but he wouldn't say that they weren't. What's unusual is that if the cancer did spread it would spread via the blood stream and they would be able to detect microscopic traces of it during a blood test, but his blood test didn't show anything. This doesn't mean anything really according to the doctor... which I found disconcerting. He said that it may be an infection or possibly the result of some trace radiation scaring. Then he said something else that it could be and the weight of the words when they left his mouth could have punched a hole in the floor: lung cancer or lymphoma.
I was not prepared for those words. His doctor continued on to say that the likely hood of it being such is small, but still something about it that just hit home too hard. I am trying to take it with a grain of salt because as he said, it's less likely that it's either of those two, but it is likely that it is cancerous.
It was all I could do not to lose it in the room. For me, the only experience I've had personally with finding out that cancer may have spread after treatment was watching it on TV or in a movie. It's not a fun thing I recommend experiencing first hand, even if you're just listening to someone else's news. Doc said that he doesn't want to risk undoing part of dad's recovery with an invasive biopsy, but instead recommended waiting two months to do another scan to see if they spots grew or stayed the same. Only then would he schedule and emergency biopsy. Makes sense. So in two more months we shall see what happens...
I'll talk about this more in later posts, but I needed to just get it off my chest in a way that would work for my process.
My family has interesting luck, not good luck, around June and August. It seems that if it's going to go bad for us, usually that's the time it's going to happen. Another reason why I dislike my birthday. Though the presents and cake aren't too bad. :)
I have to keep my chin up...but it's hard when my mind is weighted so heavily.
Thanks for reading my venting.
Cheers,
