Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong. Except, of course, that I’m a few weeks away from the one year anniversary of my life’s biggest reversal, to wit: April 14, 2015 – No Evidence of Disease (on my lungs)/April 15, 2015 – Much Evidence of Disease (a dozen tumors on my brain). Too many cancerversaries guarantees you can find something to scare you any day of the year. Facebook also doesn’t help, because lately it too insists on anniversaries. I’ve been seeing my posts from last year, when I got sick and thought it was just a common cold with sinus headache, and it turned out to be a common cold PLUS MUCH MORE CANCER.

It is too easy to go into a defensive crouch. To decide I am too afraid to know if there really is something else, whether new and horrible or more of the same old. And yet – in spite of how much I’ve been exercising, planning for the summer, registering for charity bike rides… I’m kind of freaked out.

It’s not like I have any major symptoms. Instead, minor ones. Twinges. And abnormalities that can masquerade as the normal passage of time, Change of Life.

That’s right! You get to hear more about my period!! I haven’t had one since January. Not even the faintest hint of one. Having been pregnant twice, I know I’m not pregnant, but I peed on a stick – twice – to confirm I wasn’t. My regular doctor suggested a blood test to make extra sure. I picked up the prescription for it over a week ago. And… I still haven’t made the time to go to a lab. In the meantime, I emailed Nurse Practitioner K about it, and she said it might in fact be related to my meds, and that I should have my doctor check. Yes. I will get right on that. Next week. I think…

You’re never really in the clear when you have had brushes with cancer. If it’s not the disease insinuating itself where it isn’t wanted, it’s the treatment for the disease that slaps you upside the head, as if to mock you for believing anything could be so simple, so binary as KILL/CURE.

And cancer and its associated illnesses and side effects and annoyances happens to be my job these days. So it feels like I haven’t really shown up for work lately. Time to uncoil myself from the defensive posture (or is it something else, like head burrowing into sand?). Get the bloodwork done. Hell, even spend a few hours to call the imaging place and my insurance to fight the $300+ bill for “non-standard” breast imaging from my little January scare about nothing.

And you, yes, you, sitting there reading this: Is it time for your dermatologist checkup? What do you mean you’ve never had one? Oh, you went once like maybe a year ago (which turns out to be three years)? You know what to do.