Night lasts forever...

From when George says "goodnight" to when he wakes up, the night is a miserably lonely, scary time for me. It was lonely before, but there wasn't the fear of cancer then. Now, I just sit here and think about dying of cancer. Not this time, but someday...when is anyone's guess.

I make new plans. I used to plan on things I needed to do, checks to send off in deposit for things at school, books to buy, kitchen items to pack, those types of things. Now, I think about other things--I research treatments, side effects, long-term survival rates based on different treatments.

Oddly enough, I've found that the Lance Armstrong "Livestrong" foundation has come a long way since 2004, when my mom died, in efforts to provide information to cancer patients. I filled out all sorts of questions regarding "the" cancer (I've learned you're not supposed to own it and call it "my" cancer) and it offers up the current treatment protocols for people with my type of cancer, tumor size, ER+/HER2 bullshit, and lymphatic involvement, etc.

It said there are three ways one could go: mastectomy, or lumpectomy PLUS radiation, and other adjuvant treatment is also ovarian ablation. I thought of all of these--only I wasn't thrilled about radiation--I was thinking about mastectomy as a prevention of it coming back, and/or obviating the need for radiation or chemo. I thought of a histerectomy in order to control estrogen, and thereby prevent another cancer from showing up.

I have a stress echo scheduled for today--I chose not to cancel the appointments because there are some cardiac changes that come with chemotherapy and I want to have a baseline measurement before starting any treatments.

You want to know something funny? In the paragraph above, when I tried to write "cancel" I wrote cancer. It's already become part of my life, the culture of cancer. This fucking sucks.