My body is no longer my own
As someone who has had very limited medical problems in her lifetime, it has been quite a shift to find yourself in a situation where you require intense medical treatment. Before the cancer diagnosis, my only technical surgery was getting out my wisdom teeth. When I say surgeries, in my mind, it is where you are given drugs to knock you out in some way for less awareness of the pain.
Realizing for the next 9 months of my life, my body will no longer be my own. It will be at the mercy of my medical team in collaboration of how to treat the cancer. Even now as I sit here and write this, recently having my port put into my body, and feeling the lump in my right breast, it feels almost foreign. Like I know it is all there, yet I am separate from it in some way.
Perhaps that is the psychological term of dissociation to cope with how this is all happening so quickly. I mean, two months ago, I was starting to think about if I wanted to start dating after my divorce and how I was going to cover all my expenses. I still think about these things yet the meaning behind it all feels less trivial in a sense. Like it doesn’t have as much of a stake in my psyche as it did before. And I wonder why that is?
I write this in the early morning hours because my body woke me up in discomfort and in need of some Tylenol to help it settle. As someone who barely took drugs, I am that person who would let the headache run its course instead of taking something; drugs will be something I now rely on to support me in this process. And where I accept that as a means to help me, I wonder how it will all play out too. I certainly plan to bring in alternative practices because I know its benefits. Yet, I also know, if I am going to fully rid this in my body, I will need the intense drugs too.
In meditation, much of the instruction is to see your thoughts like a movie playing and each thought is a particular scene. This is a helpful visual to recognize you are separate from your thoughts. This is how I feel as I move through this process. I see it all happening, and it is like I am watching a movie play out, but it is not me in the scene. I feel the discomfort in my body, and it is not my body. I feel all the emotions come up but I am not those emotions. There is this separate soul being, who is whole and complete and full of joy, who knows this is just part of the process on her quest to uncover a spiritual presence.
Perhaps this is just early morning ramblings yet it is what is on my heart as I let it speak through my fingers. Whatever the case may be, I am here, now in this moment and there is weirdly some peace in it all.
