If You re in Remission From Breast Cancer Could Leading a Stressful Live Trigger Cancer Again

Dana Jennings

It has been nearly two years at present since I learned I had prostate cancer, and 11 months since my last treatment. The surgical scar on my gut is fading, the radiation and hormones have leached from my body — and my soul — and my post-handling depression is gradually lifting.

I'm finally starting to feel like my old, precancer cocky, equally if I've finally returned home from a long and harrowing journeying through dark and dangerous lands with plenty of earthy tales to tell.

It'south a relief, because I haven't felt like myself for a long fourth dimension. First, there was the terrifying adrenaline whirlwind of diagnosis and decisions about treatment. So there was the pain and debilitation of radical open surgery, then the worse hurting of finding out that I had an unexpectedly aggressive Stage three cancer.

I staggered through the fog and fatigue brought on by radiation and hormone therapy, and ended up being brought depression by the cold and heavy stones of depression. I ran out of gas. I couldn't go no more than. It was time to curl upward and cocoon.

But that's past, and I'm focusing at present on my postcancer life. My oncologist is still keeping an centre on me, of grade, and my P.S.A. – prostate specific antigen – level is checked regularly, the way y'all'd check the oil in an old Ford pickup truck that runs a petty loud and rough.

I go for days at a time now without thinking about the cancer. I don't feel like Dana the Cancer Patient anymore, just just apparently one-time Dana. Taking a break from this column last fall helped with that process. I still take plenty to say nigh prostate cancer, its handling and aftermath. Just now I can look at those topics from the indicate of view of a man leading a mail-cancer life.

I'k not out of the wood yet. But those forest are thinner, brighter. My caput is clearer than it has been in ages. I walk five miles a day, and lately I've been binge-reading, wolfing down hard-boiled crime novels by writers like Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and George P. Pelecanos. It is as if I'thou trying to brand upward for lost fourth dimension as I sometimes read a novel a mean solar day.

Physically, my weight has dropped to 205 pounds from a hormone-induced loftier of 228, and my energy level is up. Equally my body returns to me, I experience equally if I'yard shrugging into a comfortable erstwhile sweater that had been misplaced for a couple of years. (But erectile function, sigh, is however a work in progress. And then over again, sexual activity is only sex, if y'all know what I mean.)

I've come through the fire of cancer and its treatment to this moment, accept been flensed to something essential. I have no patience these days for jerks, for trivia — kindness and humility matter about to me. And what I desire in this sugariness life is unproblematic: The holy company and love of my family and my friends.

I am grateful well-nigh beyond joint as I sit down hither and write this January morning, glassy past the wan winter sun, with Bijou, our creaky simply game miniature poodle, snoozing and snoring next to me.

I'chiliad trying to live 2d to second, trying to truly believe that each moment in our lives can be a small prayer.

I want to pay attention, take zip for granted, revel in the fundamental: Holding hands with my married woman at a movie; Fri coffee at 'Bucks with my buddy Herm, who's a fine Texan raconteur; the dark and bitter taste of a stiff stout on a stark and gusty night.

I guess that what I'm really trying to say is this:

Here's to a new year, a new decade and a new life.

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Source: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/feeling-like-myself-again-after-cancer/

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