I want my goddamned freedom back. I worked so hard to have it ripped from me by layering me with liver cancer in multiple organs. I was still fighting once my Hep C treatment was finshed; virus null and dead but my reward was an encapsulated liver tumor. So I forced myself upright and back onto the battle ground. I was not letting anyone near those tumors, I never wanted the Hep C trial drugs I agreeded to take. I should have turned my face away from the wall of medical professionals wanting to treat me. As I entered The Cancer Center last week for the first time, I felt in my gut ” this is where they strip me of being the human I am, this is where they suck every last particle of uniqueness from me and make me no one nobody but another cancer patient. Enter the puppy mill if you will. Here you will be eaten alive very slowly.
I entered out of a sense of curiosity and I had promised a new Oncologist that I would see the lung cancer doctor. I took one look at him in the hallway outside my waiting room and he looked at me and I felt him mentally drooling over me. Nope he is never touching me. But he did touch me when he had me climb on the table bed so he could listen to my lungs. He was old like me, 60 something and when I mounted the table in one fell swoop, on one foot and leg only, he made damn sure his hand was firmly on my ass as I dismounted the table. He was not helping me, he was dying to feel how hard this old lady’s ass is. Ah the white male medical professionals.
All in all, he was afraid to cut into my lungs because under anesthesia I can easily die, just overdose and never wake again, its diffuclt with a liver as sensitive as mine to determine the amount of sedation. He was on the side of needle guided biopsy which the Oncoligist thought would not get enough of the mass to even determine if it is liver cancer in my lungs. I had a liver biopsy and almost bled to death, it was two nights in Intensive Care back in 2003.
In that tiny examine room with the doctor and my husband all I felt was; this is not for me. I am finished here. If I ever do return, it will be because I am in so much pain, there is no other choice. But I have yet to really experience liver or lung pain. Yes I have coughed up a bit of blood but nothing to worry with, I have projectiled vommited blood and blacked out doing it. Nothing like the problems I would create by first letting The Cancer Center fill my lungs and system with chemo then fill with liver with radiation, Yitruim -90. Then miracuously the lung cancer disappears, the liver tumor is shrunk to 4 cm a bingo, I am put on the transplant list. Right, Bingo…
I see a woman beaten completely beaten down by chemicals, a shell of myself buckling under the weight of my shoulders.
If you can still stand under the stress of having everything strength in your body robbed from you because you have been filled with toxic chemicals, where is the life in all this? What part would belong to me?
No one turns their back on treatment, these doctors have no scenario for what happens when its left alone. No one keeps those stats. Why would they? Yes, its professionals trying to save lives with chemo, radiation and transplants but that is their only job. They have no other job that will put food on their tables. They are only into treatment. Its their job to save lives and they do but I am a reasonable woman, I laid all my cards on the table, I read them. I fold. I am out of this game. I am back to plan A, just live for as long as I can. Just get up again. There is no rush, you have all the time in the world.
But the ground feels not under my feet and I keep staring off into the clouds. There is a 5 pound Kettle Ball in my gut all day and night every day and night now. Its the only pain I know. It limits my ability to ride and hoop. Its difficult to hide it much less cycle or hoop with its weight and discomfort at the foreground of every thought. Just goddamn disappear please. It may cause more fatigue than the liver cancer or cancer in my lungs. At this point, everything gets mixed up, there is no definition, I am not fixed here, I feel myself drifting further away from life. I have lost my grip, I am unengaged with nothing to hold onto. I am trying for a new landing, if I get it then it comes with a new runway to start over and try taking off again.
I really long to begin again, where is my sexy, where is my badass, why can’t I fly?
Living With Hepatitis C 
