I am a healthy person. I eat well, take care of myself, and typically have plenty of energy. I rarely go to the doctor and when I do it’s usually for injury rather than illness. The last time I got blood work done for a physical, the doctor told me I was one of the healthiest people she had ever seen.
On Thursday, I scheduled myself an appointment because I was having a tremendous amount of pain throughout my entire abdominal cavity, along with pain when I took sudden deep breaths which felt as though I might have cracked ribs and intense lower back pain. The discomfort started out as just that discomfort and over about a week got slowly worse then suddenly became very painful. AS an indication of how bad it was, I can say as an individual who will barely take aspirin, I was seriously considering going to the ER.
I scheduled my self an appointment for the following day. The fact that the pain moved around from day to day was confusing. I went and had blood work done and was scheduled for a CT scan the following day.
I was given the results of that scan about an hour later and my world was through off its axis. I was told that I had nodules in my lungs and intestine, a cyst on my ovary, and a lesion on my hip bone. I just sat there in stunned silence. I was told some of it looked suspicious and some not so much but the real concern was that it was all there together. This news was so shocking to me that I didn’t even discuss what I had intended when I went in that morning which was that I thought I had a lung infection.
I had gone on a vision quest in the New Mexico desert about 3 months ago and slept outside under the stars. During that time I had also inadvertently inhaled a big breath of sage smoke which had sent off on a coughing fit. On my drive back home to Florida I began experiencing sharp pains when I breathed in suddenly like yawns, sneezes, laughs, etc. Overtime, the pain went away and I had a slight dry cough which seemed to be going away when I went back to my teaching job and caught a cold. The cold symptoms were mild and went away quickly but I was left with mild chest congestion for quite some time, then just the the dry cough I had been experiencing before which lingered a bit and eventually seemed to be going away until this all started up.
Many of my family members have both had and died from cancer, especially lung cancer, so the possibility of my having it scares the hell out of me. I’m still convinced that I have a lung infection, perhaps something like Valley Fever, which is found in the SW desert and which if untreated can cause nodules in the lungs and even move on to other parts of the body, however, the chance is still there that this is much worse.
After my initial reaction, I pretty much said fuck cancer, I am not doing cancer. This is bullshit. Yet the possibility remains. I sat with it for a while and I have always been in tune with my body, and I just feel like it doesn’t fit. Yet the possibility remains. I have started using an herbal tea to treat the infection myself and am already feeling much better. And yet…the possibility remains.
This is like any other negative situation. The not knowing is very possibly the hardest part. So I wait. Tuesday I have a PET scan and should know more, and until then I will continue saying fuck cancer, you are not welcome here. I will remain my typically positive self and I will use this time to reflect on what has brought me to this point, because cancer, infection, or whatever it may be, we all share in the responsibility of was has brought us down this road in our journey. And there is always a lesson or treasure to be found at the end of the journey.
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