Puzzled

The death of Elizabeth Edwards has thrown my online breast cancer community into a frenzy. Post after post articulating SHOCK that she could die of breast cancer. "Isn't Stage IV a chronic disease?" "But it was only in her bones." Now, from the general public, I can understand these responses, but from the Stage IV community? What are they thinking?

Breast cancer once it has left the breast and metastized is terminal. End of story. There are treatments to hold back the terminal part, but eventually all of us with metastized breast cancer will die of it. [Okay, technically we could fall of a cliff first in which case we died of something else.]

I simply don't understand this universal denial of what Stage IV means. Elizabeth Edwards is certainly not the only woman this year to have died from breast cancer. On these very same boards we have lost so many wonderful women this year. None of them fell off of a cliff.

Ramblings....

I have had seven or is it eight butt injections now. My blood markers have come down slowly. It would appear that I am hanging with Reggie. News that should have me crowing, but no. This is all so futile since in the end, these damn tumors will take over. On my good days, I hope for 8 years. Hoping for more than that brings some weird superstitions to the fore, and I am not even superstitious!

This week has been the week of gigs, and at yesterday's C. who I haven't seen in ages actually asked me directly how I was doing. She is the first person who has asked this, and actually meant it. For the first time, I lied. I wish I could create a picture of what my brain did as it processed this question. I felt little lights blinking, and for a nano-second I considered telling the truth, and then even faster rejected that as too risky, and then lied.

Why? Because I am finally being treated like a person instead of a person-with-cancer. I still don't fully understand why after getting sick in 2005, the calls for gigs simply dried up. There is no question that the amount of work out there is decreasing, and I was never a gig-whore, so maybe it was all a co-incidence. There is no way to know.

The irony is, I am finally being treated as a person again, and now I am once again a person-with-cancer. Irony is a type of humor right?