Jay Lake (jaylake) wrote,
Jay Lake
jaylake

[cancer] Living in the two-month box

So the CT scan came and went. My next scan will be about October 8th. Every eight weeks, I will get rescanned. We will look to see if the Regorafenib continues to stave off my terminal decline. Until the day we look and see that it has failed.

Then I will finish the dying process. Pending the possibility of a study drug buying me a bit more life.

It's a weird kind of limbo. I live in a two-month box. Every two months, I get to find out if I climb into another box, or if I'm starting the slide into death. My oncologist cautiously opines that because I'm responding so well to the Regorafenib, I may have a number of those two-month boxes ahead of me.

But still, it's a wall of death every time.

And like so much about terminal cancer, this makes me feel crazy.

I can't really plan very far ahead. I can't really look to what will happen next, beyond the two-month box. Everything I want to do has to fit into these eight-week cycles. Hope is toxic, and the future is all too certain. We lost this war last spring, but the battles go on.

The irony is I could be here having these same conversations with myself in 2015. Or just as possible, I could be gasping out my final good-byes early next spring. We don't know. I don't know.

It's just a box. The one I live in. I have measured out my life with CT scans; I know the voices dying with a dying fall.

God, this is a long, slow fall to oblivion.

Tags: cancer, health, personal
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