In-Between Days by Teva Harrison

Author:Teva Harrison
Format: epub

Can’t Be Trusted

Hope is a dangerous thing. It’s absolutely crucial all the time, or I couldn’t go on. I am a naturally optimistic person, and I am inclined to hope for the moon. But I can’t put too much hope in any one thing.

Especially now. In one moment, everything can change.

The reality of advanced cancer is that if we manage to stabilize it, it’s only stable for an indeterminate while. My disease is highly adaptive, constantly trying to figure out how to get around whatever obstacle my doctors and I put in front of it. And it’s only ever a matter of time before it finds a way around the barricades and begins to grow again or set up shop somewhere new.

And when it does, we change the treatment, hoping to stall it in its tracks again. The order of treatments is like this: first, the most easily tolerated drugs; then each subsequent treatment comes with new, more difficult side effects.

In the beginning, in addition to the primary tumour in my left breast, I had metastases in three bones and two lymph nodes.

My first line of treatment lasted about eleven months. By ten months, I was starting to feel that I was going to be okay. I started to dream bigger, to think about going back to work, to hope that I might be one of those lucky women who manages to live a long time with this disease, that I might even live long enough for scientists to find out how to stop my cancer in a more meaningful way.

While giving me my bone-strengthening injection, a nurse even described my cancer as “less aggressive.” I was over the moon. Which made the fall much worse when I found out the next month that my cancer had spread to a shiny new organ: my liver.

That’s why I need to be careful. Hope is delicious, heady stuff, but reality has a way of upsetting the applecart.

I have to find a way to balance the hope I need to get up every day with the pragmatism I need to deal with bad news.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.