I know what you're thinking, and yes, I used a day counter.
I don't know what it was about today that made me decide to revive this blog. NO, I DON'T HAVE CANCER AGAIN. I think it was earlier today when I started talking to myself about my cancer-related feelings, I thought, "Why don't I share this with the internet again?" I'll feel less crazy if I at least have an audience. Plus, I guess it's pretty unrealistic for me to act like it only took exactly a year to recover.
This summer, I'm working in an AML research lab at the Cancer Center here in Rochester. And let me tell you, I love it. I work with amazing people, my project is so interesting, and I really feel like I'm contributing to something that will have a positive impact on people with AML.
Of course, there is a slight downside to this; I'm really being forced to deal with all of the emotional aspects of my experience in a way that I'm now realizing I never did. When I was diagnosed, something inside me shifted, and I went into survival mode. The social workers and psychologists constantly reminded me that "it's okay to be sad and/or scared," and I kept reassuring them that I was completely fine. My experiences this summer are making me understand why they thought I was using humor to "cope."
In the lab, I work with patient AML samples. People get diagnosed, their leukemia cells get extracted and delivered to us in a bag, we give them a name like "061812," and we do our experiments. For the most part, I feel removed enough from these samples that it doesn't bother me. But whenever we do the experiments and we get a particularly interesting sample, we go back to the records to learn a little more about the patient. And most of the time, it's not happy news. "Oh yeah, that person was extremely sick when he came in. He died pretty soon after he was diagnosed."
Oh, okay, great.
About a month ago, I shadowed my PI for an afternoon while he was in clinic. I thought it would be pretty interesting to talk to people who had AML and see how the doctors handled all the cases. It wasn't. Adult AML is treated completely differently than pediatric AML. Most of the patients are too old to handle the absurd amount of chemotherapy that I got, so a lot of them end up relapsing. And if you keep relapsing, it will eventually kill you. So for me to shake the hand of someone who could very possibly die of what I got through in just a few months is not simply uncomfortable. It's traumatizing. And it brought back that burning question I kept asking myself when my hospital roommate died: Why am I alive?
I know there's no answer to that. I'm alive, I'm thankful that's how it worked out, and now I'm doing my best to help other people by working in this lab, raising money for the LLS, and hopefully writing this blog so other people like me know it's okay to have a lot of feelings. Even if you don't like talking about them.
Today I went to a talk at Strong about leukemia stem cells. The basic concept is that some people have these incredibly stubborn leukemia cells that become chemo-resistant and cause people to either never achieve remission or keep relapsing. It was at this talk that I truly realized what makes my job so personally terrifying. In order to prove that your research is worthwhile, you need to emphasize how deadly the disease is, how difficult/impossible it is to treat, and how many people are dying of it. As a survivor, I need to sit there and convince myself that I had a good-prognosis mutation, that my treatment went perfectly fine, and that I'm not going to die.
And that contradiction is what's making this summer so...interesting.
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