What makes you feel like offing yourself tonight

[orthodoc]

Not tonight, necessarily. But it's been a theme since my diagnosis. With this cancer there is no cure, there is no complete remission. I stood up and fought the good fight, had the surgery, survived the damnable complications (don't ask); survived the chemo with most of my neurons intact. Not all, but most, and I can get by.

I lost my faith in anything a long time ago, so I have no idea what faces me when my heart and brain stop working. That isn't a variable in the equation of whether to continue existing here, or whether to advance to what (if anything) lies beyond.

I cope just fine in the daytime, get up at 0600 and feed the cats, go to work. I arrive early, in time to look up references pertinent to the patients I'll see during the day. I see my patients, do my best by them, write up all the paperwork and documentation.

I spend time doing research on safety issues, important issues, things I want to see done better - so that tragedies don't repeat themselves. I've seen so many tragedies, want to prevent those we can, avert the grief.

At night it's a different story. I live alone, do my work, work out, go to bed, and still I have to fight this feeling that I'd be better out of this world. That I'm living on borrowed time anyway, so what does it matter. I'm waiting for my Stage 4 diagnosis, waiting for the news that I'm treatable but not curable. But that's the news I had from the beginning: this cancer is treatable but not curable. So what does it matter? I'm dead woman walking.

I hate the Pink Industry, Pinktober, Nancy Brinker's personal pink jet and all the rest. It's all about the lie that breast cancer is preventable, detectable, erasable. Nancy Brinker has done very well out of her sister's death. But this cancer continues to kill more than 40,000 women every year in this country.

For now, I can cope with my workload. I worry about starting my new job in July. I'll have to show that my diagnosis doesn't impact my abiity to do my job. I won't have the same support system around me.

I've been unlucky enough to be the one in eight who gets this disease. It's not my first experience of lousy luck/circumstances. I don't know why I should continue striving, trying to move ahead. For what?