I’d told myself I wouldn’t write anything this month. Last October was my first Breast Cancer Awareness Month as someone with breast cancer, and I was angry. I’d joined a social media campaign to call out companies engaging in Pinkwashing (aka profiting off the disease that’s stolen over a year of my life and is still killing my friends) and raised money for breast cancer research. I had so much to say and to share and to release.
This BCAM feels more like someone took a wash bucket to my blinding hot rage. My anger is tempered and sudsy. It takes energy to be that angry, and I’m tired. And a little sad.
Last week, I saw a clump of hair in the bathroom during one of my appointments. A normal artifact of a cancer clinic bathroom, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
The reason your hair falls out during chemo is because chemo attacks fast-growing cells; the cancer is the target, but your hair follicles become collateral damage. What people often don’t realize about this is that the process can make the remaining hair on your head feel heavy. Your scalp can become unbearably sore. My first ever round of chemo was December 19th, 2024. I started losing my hair on New Year’s Eve and made it three days before rush-ordering a pair of clippers and shaving the rest off.
My scalp ached and stung. I can handle a lot of things, but I can’t stand stinging. The immediate relief that came with shaving my head was so incredible that I never really stopped to mourn the hair I’d lost – until last week, when I saw someone else’s hair on a bathroom floor early in the afternoon and finally cried about my own hair later that night.
My two year cancerversary is approaching, and nothing is going as planned (and yes, I realize the irony of expecting anything to go as planned considering this entire situation). This month should’ve seen me being halfway done with my two years of oral chemo (Verzenio); instead, I’ve had to switch to a different oral chemo (Kisqali) and tacked on an additional year of the medication. There’s a strange guilt in “failing” a drug. I know it isn’t my fault, but it still feels like I’ve done something wrong. Ultimately, the change was suggested by my oncologist, who knows I would’ve white-knuckled through the next year had he not given me a spiel about wanting to give me quality of life. It is a blessing and a curse to be so seen.
I started pelvic floor therapy this month and got a prescription for vaginal estrogen. When I went to pick it up, the tech explained that using the cream could cause birth defects and asked me if that would be an issue. I think I blinked quickly enough to hide that I teared up, but I can’t be sure. Just the other day I explained to someone that I don’t actually know whether or not I’ll ever be able to become pregnant: I’ve been getting monthly Lupron shots since before chemo started in order to suppress and (hopefully) protect my ovaries, but it’s possible that once I’m done with the shots in a few years, my periods never come back. I bristle at any mention of pregnancy, not just my own. It feels unfair and offensive that my own hypothetical question mark eclipses my ability to be fully present for other people’s most joyous moments.
That’s not limited to pregnancy, either. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted a relationship as much as I did during treatment. Whenever I’m down with something like a bad summer cold, I think about how nice it would be if I had someone to take care of me. The last almost two years have amplified that wish in a longing, desperate way. Lately, I’ve been trying and failing not to notice the difference between the attention my pre-cancer dating profiles got and what they’re getting now.
There’s a lot of debate in the Facebook groups about whether or not you should be upfront about having had cancer on the apps. I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t be able to handle getting to know someone only for him to reject me after finding out that I had cancer, may never be able to have kids, and can’t say for sure that it’ll never come back. I need people like that to weed themselves out, no hard feelings. I try to remind myself of that whenever I start to delete the disclosure and replace it with something cooler and more intriguing. Cancer is mysterious, but it’s not very sexy.
Last weekend, I got out on the water with a local Dragon Boat Club. The club has two teams, and one of them is full of breast cancer survivors. At the event, someone asked me how long I’d been a survivor, and I stumbled my way through an answer. I don’t think I’d ever actually called myself a survivor until I finished active treatment last September, even though the cancer was believed to be gone after my double mastectomy a few months prior (something I didn’t learn until I was well into radiation, actually). This summer, I finally had my follow-up scans to confirm that the cancer was indeed gone. The internal mammary node that lit up in 2024 – which upgraded my staging from 2 to 3c – only appeared in an MRI, something I couldn’t get done until after my tissue expanders came out in April of this year. I’d been considered cancer-free for nearly a year by the time I was able to finally get a follow-up MRI to actually confirm it. When nothing lit up, I felt like I exhaled for the first time since November 2024.
When I talk about cancer, I fiddle with the tenses (“had” versus “have”). Active treatment is over, but I’m still on medication for the next decade. In March, I’m having a (third!) reconstructive surgery that I’d really, really hoped to avoid, and will need to have at least one more after that. October 2025 me would be shocked to hear this; she definitely thought we would’ve been done with this part of things by now. I used to think that people with cancer talked about it a lot, and now I understand why. It has affected every single part of my life and I can’t go a day without having to think about (or take something for) it. There’s no way to talk about my day-to-day life without talking about cancer. There’s no way to talk about my future without talking about cancer. I think now that I should’ve answered the question of “how long have you been a survivor?” with “almost two years.” Since November 11, 2024. I’ve been surviving this entire time. It’s just taken me a while to notice.
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