When you swim the English Channel, best to just finish what you start
I was beginning to feel like my days were just numbers on the calendar of my cycle, demarcated only by injections and pills, the hours in between erased by force of will, as if I could make them go faster. That is how the waiting always feels; long stretches of emptiness in between the dates on the calendar marked with things like “start Femara, begin Femstillin injections, day 21, order more Lupron.” Countdowns and checklists and constant inventories of my physical state.
My period started today, on day 19 of my cycle. That makes today, day 1, not day 19, and tomorrow day 2, when I am supposed to start my stims.
Funny how fluid time is; depending, as it does, on how you track it. And how you track it depends entirely on these arbitrary events in your life that become all consuming.
AD. After Death. For years my entire life revolved around the death of my father and the aftermath.
BC. Before Cancer. The years when we thought time was limitless and our lives together secure.
AC. After Cancer. A period filled with relief, gratitude, and a determination to value life, each other, and the big picture.
FT: Fertility Treatments. This period stands in stark relation to AC, as all that life affirming clarity drains away.
I am wasting all the hours and all the days in between each damn injection and appointment, in an ineffectual effort to cope with this process. Not very zen or yogi of me. I am not living mindfully or indelibly. A friend of mine said that she thinks this whole process is teaching me patience; that she sees it. I don’t feel more patient. I feel desperately impatient. I feel as if this process has brought all my flaws to the surface; an inability to cede control over situations, impatience, self-absorption.
Mindful living appeals to me. I feel like being able to exercise its tenets would have helped me, and those around me, a lot in the last few years. Unfortunately, it is inherently an imperfectible pursuit, meant to be practiced constantly. There is never a bad time to start, but I feel like jumping in now, and abandoning my current coping mechanisms would be a little like someone who is attempting to swim the English Channel deciding, three quarters of the way across, that this is obviously not working out well, they would rather take a boat, and then turning around to swim back instead of just finishing the swim.
I am waiting for this process to be over so that the rest of my life can start, regardless of how this last cycle goes. Mindfulness will be how I cope when there are no more appointments or injections to gauge or track my life by.
Then again, isn’t life what happens when you are waiting for your life to begin?