Twice now in the last two days, I've ended up telling the entire story of #natsmetastaticthyroidcancertreatment to people who apparently had no idea. Well, apparently: the first, yesterday, I thought I had mentioned something to Larry before, but apparently not... but today's audience was a pair of folk that definitely had absolutely no idea what they signed up for when they asked me how I was recovering from my cold. After spending about 25 minutes explaining the ins and outs of having had two different surgeons get all up in my neck, two people looked at me dumbfounded, as to how someone so previously unassuming could have had such a complicated (horrifying?) story to tell about why they were talking a little funny but better than last week.
So the question arises: am I a good storyteller?
I know I can write out a lot here, and I know I can just fill dead air with assembled facts about existence. I used to actually pride myself on being able to talk and talk without actually revealing anything about who I am and how I process the world. It was a skill that kept me from having to actually engage with new people when I started school here... as someone who was a pegged off-scale-high introvert, the easiest way to process "I'm in college" was to spew endless facts and never actually explain what relevance they had to me - to summon encyclopedic knowledge about my own experience as a substitute for sharing why it was my experience, and not someone else's. Part of going through therapy for being a basket case ahead of treatment for surgery involved reaching a level of comfort analyzing why being able to do pull-ups off the backboard at my friend's house is something I remember (a fleeting example of teenage athleticism), and why I'm so proud of the night at band camp I ended by trying desperately to pass out by locking my knees at attention (we all go through an anti-authority rebellious phase, and mine happened to last about half an hour one September night).
I guess I can thread beads together to make a necklace, is what I'm getting at.
The interesting thought comes in something I said the night before my surgery... "This isn't strength. This is autopilot." The thoughts are connected by the dawning horror I witnessed as three adults who seem to like me watched me explain the years of suffering I've endured at the hands of chance. I've been through a lot. When I dealt with my third neck surgery, it was less than a year after I had booked my right thyroid lobectomy, and just about 14 months after my first biopsy. It was old hat, basically... I had developed a tolerance to procedure and was ready as if no big deal were on the docket. Fast forward five years as I prepared to undergo number four and I found myself petrified in a way I hadn't been since I managed to get the inertia together to go for biopsy in 2013. My heart beat firm but shallow, I felt an absence of life in my face, and my thoughts were void of any recognizable emotion. I realized at some point it was because fight-or-flight hadn't set in, and that I was looking at instead a self-preservation emotion that boiled down to "maybe [surgery's] visual acuity is based on motion like t-rex" (yes, I know, not how it really worked). If I didn't move, none of this would catch up to me. Then 3:45am rolled around and it was time to load up and head up for funtime. Anyway, the scheduling was nothing - it wasn't real - while the actual trip to the hospital was the passage of millennia, the slow machination of water replacing everything I hold to be my own identity with what I'm supposed to do, with the automation of "fill out this form and show up at this place and hope you don't flip your shit before they put you under." It works... it's a working strategy, but probably not a healthy strategy. Maybe it is. Maybe it's healthy because it did get me in the door, because it did get me treatment for disease. I definitely can't recommend it as a treatment to other people. I don't perceive what I did in July as "strong" - it was, surely, in the sense that I could have just ignored it. I definitely wanted to ignore it. But when most people think strength, or what most people would think of what I did as strong, I would imagine they probably imagine a fearlessness, a machismo, an adulthood. I felt like a terrified child that night, and when I think back on it, I don't admire anything resembling strength, I admire my tenacity or perseverance. I admire the fact that I actually woke up with my alarms and got in the car.
I think what I identify the most with in my own experience is the wave of dread washing over a new audience. I don't want to call that good or bad - I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, and I think it's important to recognize and appreciate that I did actually go through with having more disease removed - but I know it's important to describe it as the way I dealt with this specific adversity. I'm not a stone... in many ways, I'm the terrified child my parents brought to the hospital with the mystery illnesses, or for one of the myriad head injuries I inflicted upon myself by approaching life brain-first.
If only it'd gotten me into therapy a little sooner...
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