Happy Anniversary, I’ll Live. I’m a few days late, my first post was November 9, 2014. This corner of cyberspace (to use a term that makes me sound ridiculously ancient) has existed for ten years now, which seems like an impossibly long time, in Cancer Years. A decade ago today, I posted three times on the same day, indicating how little I was up to, because I was so sick.

I’ve had plenty of occasions to think about the name I selected for this blog. It wasn’t intended as a prophecy, although maybe secretly I hoped it would be. It was mostly meant to be ironic: “Yeah, you know, it’s just a little Stage 4 cancer… but I’ll live!” [shrug] Little did I know how unlikely my survival would be, what a fluke the durability of my response to treatment — which has yet to be referred to using the C-word by any practitioner who has had me in their care, and might never be(?). “Long-term remission” seems to be the most I can aspire to saying. Whether I am “cured” is the elephant that comes into the exam room with me when I visit my oncologist after every set of scans (my next scans are tomorrow). I spend my time updating my oncologist on details of my personal life he knows to ask me about from seeing notes about it in my EHR — what I’m up to at work, what my kids are up to, etc. It’s more of a social call these days — a social call with a costume change to a gown and some palpation at the end of it. Sometimes I ask what happened at the latest ASCO meeting, to sound like I’m more of an insider. I don’t think there have been any recently, so I might ask Dr. L what conferences he has been to. There are always conferences. He won’t really care what I got up to at the last conference I attended, of course. That’s not his job. His job is more like, “Make sure she gets to attend another conference.”

The last time I went for my social call with Dr. L, I didn’t even get the bloodwork I’ve been getting for a while now, a CTDNA test, which checks for circulating tumor particles in the bloodstream. The reason I’ve stopped getting the test is that they have switched labs, and the new lab needed a tumor sample from me. And there simply are no new samples, just the one from ten years ago now. I have even aged out of being checked for circulating tumor particles. (Yay?)

What Dr. P’s and Nurse Practitioner K’s and Nurse Practitioner R’s jobs were, exactly a decade ago, was, “Do what you can to ensure she will be sitting at a computer ten years from now writing a reflective blog post, instead of where she is today in 2014, working hard to recover from the colitis her cancer treatment brought on, sleepless due to Prednisone, cultivating empathy for anyone in the history of the world who has been starved or had to avoid eating because it was causing them terrible pain.” I continue to be so grateful to them, but find it hard to express this in a comprehensive and comprehensible way. They are responsible for my survival, but I haven’t spoken to them in years, at this point.

I suppose I am somehow responsible for my survival, too, but I’ve never figured out where or for what exactly I could take credit. I treated cancer like it was my job, because at the time (at least, ten years ago), I didn’t have another job. So I showed up and took my meds and went to all my scans. I recall one morning when I was in a subway delay on the way to NYU for a scan. There was no way to know when we’d get moving again, there wasn’t phone service underground, and the first thought that sprang into my head was, “This is so unprofessional!” I was a professional cancer patient. But so many other patients have complied with what they were asked to do, and they didn’t make it. It isn’t compliance or professionalism, although of course compliance helps. Ultimately, it’s just luck of the draw.

I haven’t slept well the past couple of nights. Is scanxiety rearing its head? Because it couldn’t possibly be anxiety about the state of the world, hormonal fluctuations, or any one of an endless number of other things. Perhaps tonight, before heading to bed in anticipation of another early wakeup (I try to schedule my scans as early as possible), I’ll try to cultivate some serenity through music.

(I’m just not sure how many times I can listen to this on an endless loop before throwing my phone across the room…)