It was cancer.

I didn’t know that it was cancer until I woke up after surgery. We’d agreed, the oncologist and I, that if it was cancer, he’d take everything out. If it was benign, I’d just lose my ovaries. When I woke up, I asked the nurse if I still had a uterus. He said no. And then the ground opened up underneath me and I lost track of myself.

At first, the oncologist said that it did not look good. There were no ovaries left in the tumors that had consumed them. It looked like stage 3 HGSC. You should not look up the survival rates, they told me, which I then immediately did and then thought about survivor benefits for my daughter vs. medical debt for rolling the dice on treatments to try to stay alive.

What most people say is that ovarian cancer is a cancer you manage. It’s never really gone. It just grows and spreads sometimes and sometimes does not. And also, once you have cancer, you are Forever With Cancer. If you’re past the point of treatment, and you’re looking like you’re in the clear, you have visits with oncologists every 3 months to see if you’re living or dying. Then six months. Then annually, then every three years or every year until you die, either of cancer or of something else. Most cancer treatments have side effects that take people out.

I joined a support group for people with ovarian cancer. And it’s taught me to see the pattern in how people seem to go. Bowel obstructions are killing most of the people in the group who are dying. They post on the group page to ask about effective ways to move one’s bowels. They get advice. They are admitted to a hospital. Then hospice, and then a spouse or sometimes a sister will post about losing that person and how good it was that the group was there to help support them. People talk about the importance of second opinions. Some people post about how they’re still here, years later, not dying of cancer.

For about ten days after surgery, the time slipped back and forth, and I don’t remember much. My sister in law came over with groceries and told me again and again how well I was doing, how good it was to see me be up and around because when she had a hysterectomy, she was in bed for far longer. I may have said out loud that if I was going to die, I did not want to rest. But I didn’t want to not rest either. I was on a lot of drugs, and the drugs made time move differently, and it did not feel like a blessing to be blissfully stoned. It felt like robbery.

A best friend came to help with all of the things that I usually do. She dropped my kid off and picked her up from school and took her to gymnastics and did yoga at night and read her stories and tucked her in, and it was a blessing and it also felt like robbery.

Somewhere in there, the oncologist called with an update from pathology. Cancer, but low grade and less deadly. But the five year survival rate is between 70% and 85%. That’s not 100%. I asked the oncologist if he thought this was going to take me out, and he said, “Not necessarily.” Because I could get into a car accident or have a heart attack or be hit by a meteor. The drug I’m taking to keep cancer at bay causes liver failure. So, there’s that as a possibility, too.

It seems like if I follow The Rules, I could maybe get to live. I need to lose body fat. I already have osteopenia from malnutrition from disordered eating in my youth, so now I need to lift weights and strength train. Morning: levothyroxine, celexa (hot flashes and depression), low dose aspirin (inflammation), zyrtec (helps with bone pain), omega 3s, chinese herbal stuff having to do with mushrooms and NK cells and salvia and gingko to try to stave off heart disease and brain fog from suddenly not having access to estrogen. Garlic (anticancer), tart cherry (inflammation and pain), berberine (I don’t remember). Night: Metformin (something about blood sugar and cancer, and PCOS still being A Thing despite not having ovaries), anastrazole (normally for breast cancer, but this time for ovarian cancer), calcium, magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin D, a multi vitamin. And now, sometimes xanax or klonpin if I need to stop panicking about death and the future. Sometimes straight up weed if I want to be in my body and to enjoy the cold sheets against my skin in the middle of a hot flash.

For the first time in her six years of life, my daughter did not have to beg me to sleep with her. I just wanted (still want) to hold on to her as much and as long as I can. I want her to know the fierceness of my love. I don’t want to deliver to her my middle-of-the-night terror of dying and leaving her without a mother before she gets to adulthood, but the thought lives on a carousel in my mind, round and round and up and down and always, always there in the background. And I tell myself that I want to be there if she needs me in the night, when she wakes up uncertain about what’s real. I want her to know that I’m there, that I’m real, that I love her unconditionally every single second, even when it doesn’t seems like it.

I started seeing a therapist. She tells me that I need to learn to love myself just as fiercely, and that’s just not as easy.

What I do to love myself:

Stare at myself in the mirror. Say, “I love you.” Laugh at me. See the bitterness in my eyes toward me. I have always felt this sense of disdain. Try to talk myself out of hating me. I love you when you’re hard. I love you even when you have cancer. I love you even when you forget The Rules.

Dance in the kitchen to shitty 80s metal. It helps. It makes me laugh at me too. And when I feel silly, when I feel myself nurturing the disdain, I dance harder, and more ridiculously.

I drink expensive coffee.

I’m working on it. It’s not enough.