Thursday, May 28, 2020

The Impossibility of Forgetting Cancer

Chemotherapy killed my veins, and quarterly blood tests won't let me forget that. How it's impossible to ever forget the changes cancer brings. 
PUBLISHED MAY 26, 2020
As well as being a cancer blogger, Laura Yeager is a religious essayist and a mental health blogger. A graduate of The Writers’ Workshop at The University of Iowa, she teaches writing at Kent State University and Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Laura survived cancer twice.
One of the things that I as a cancer survivor wish I could do is forget I had cancer.

Oh, to sink back into pre-cancer days, beyond the treatments, the pain and the fear. I would love to return to the innocence of 2010, a year before my breast cancer was found. But this is impossible for me to do because there are so many reminders that I endured two bouts of the disease.

For one, I don't have any breasts. That's a big reminder. And then, there are the scars all over my chest and back. There's the little port scar on my arm. But the most annoying reminder is the fact that every time I get a blood test, the phlebotomist can never find a vein. They say chemo "kills" your veins; well, it did mine.



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