Cancer causes paranoia

This morning I had an experience that was very unpleasant, but that is already starting to seem funny to me.

If you're a regular reader, you'll know I lived through my second round of ovarian cancer a few months ago. Just this week I was marvelling that the human mind is incredibly resilient--already I can hardly remember parts of the experience. For the first couple of months, it was so strongly present in my mind that I couldn't get through a single conversation, even with strangers, without mentioning the cancer or something related to it. Now I go for days without thinking about it, and I'm enjoying feeling and looking like a normal person.

But yesterday I had a doctor's appointment, not with my oncologist (that's not til April) but with another doctor who is helping me do some alternative therapies that will hopefully strengthen my body to fight the cancer naturally so it won't come back, or won't come back as badly. Don't worry, I'll still probably do whatever treatments my oncologist recommends as the years go by, but I figure it can't hurt to do the other stuff too.

So yesterday I had this appointment, and it was harder afterwards to pretend that I'm not four months out of a really scary medical emergency.

Then, this morning I woke up dizzy. That's never happened before. L came into our bed as usual in the wee hours, and he slept til about 6:30, at which point he started squirming. M was aready up, but he heard L talking to me and came in to rescue me so I could sleep a while longer. I propped myself up on my elbow to drink some water, and felt so dizzy that for a minute I didn't know which way was up. I drank the water, flopped back down, and went back to sleep for about an hour and a half. I woke up again at 8, and forgot about the dizzy spell earlier. I lay in bed thinking for a half an hour, as I like to do on the weekends, until 8:30 when I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

Wow, that was a mistake. I was so dizzy. I sat for a few minutes but it didn't get better or worse, so I decided the only thing I could do was go about my morning routine, but carefully. I walked to the window to check the weather (rain) and managed not to fall down by holding onto furniture most of the way. I washed and dressed. I even gave myself an injection (that alternative cancer therapy I told you about). I ate a very hearty breakfast in case the problem was at all related to blood sugar.

For the next hour, I got more and more freaked out. There's pressure in my head. I'm still dizzy. I just don't feel good. No, I don't think it's sinuses. Maybe I shouldn't go to the coffee shop with a bunch of friends and their kids like I had planned. Am I well enough to take care of L for four hours this afternoon while M goes out?

See, here's why the whole thing was so disturbing, and now seems sort of funny. I was afraid that I had a brain tumor. Years ago, a dear family friend had breast cancer, got better, and then started getting headaches and dizziness and blurred vision and then eventually died from brain cancer.

So here I am on a Saturday morning, feeling inexplicably dizzy, and I'm already thinking, shit, I would have no privacy if we had to put a hospital bed in our living room. And how would little L have his friends over if his mother was dying?

While I was squinting all around trying to figure out if my vision was blurring, I found that I really didn't want to look toward the kitchen, where, as usual, M had all the lights turned on.

Hmm. Light sensitivity? That sounds like my usual early warning sign when I'm getting a migraine.

Sure enough, before long there was that ice pick feeling in the back of my head. My migraines are much better than most people's because they're almost always treatable.

I immediately took 2 extra-strength tylenol and made a big cup of very strong coffee. By the time M and L left for the cafe twenty minutes later, I was feeling spry enough to go with them. I took it easy today--after the thing at the cafe was over, L and I went to my mom's house and she fed us lunch and then played with L for two hours while I napped on the couch.

So now I'm fine, with the faintest shadow of a migraine left over. I have never in my life been so overjoyed to have a migraine.

Now, just so you don't underestimate my level of paranoia, I'll tell you that even migraines scare me, because they're hormone-related (I got my first one when I was pregnant with L) and so is my cancer. So when I have a migraine I think, holy fuck, my hormones are out of whack. This is bad. Today migraines, tomorrow cancer.

But at the moment, a migraine seems like a wonderful thing, a normal thing that people get all the time, people who don't have brain tumors.

Boston Gal says if I don't feel like writing about money any more I should just write about whatever I want. You see what you get when you give me free reign, Boston Gal? You get stories like this one. I think it's funny. Ha, ha! I thought I had a brain tumor and it was just a little headache after all! Isn't that a scream?

What do you think? Is this funny, or pathetic?

Maybe it's both.