And I mean that title in many ways, but first, the housekeeping. I have not written in 2 years, and to be fair to myself, the last 2 years have been HARD, and the next 10-12 months may continue to be hard. More on that in a minute. I am starting to chase a new dream in the middle of this period in what feels like a wasteland, so I’ll touch on that, too. You are welcome if you are a returning reader or a new reader! As a refresher, I write about the things that happen in my life, show you the real pain that I feel, the joy, the gratitude, the nerdy, the religious, and the imperfect parts of me where God is still healing and honing me to complete the good works he created me for before I was even a flutter in my mom’s gut. That comes with its ups and downs, and then I also have some medical (mental) health issues that compound the effect those swinging emotions can have on me.
I guess I will jump right in on this monster of a post. 2022 was a year of deep anguish. We finally did our first embryo transfer from our adopted embryos. It took! I was so excited! I got my first positive pregnancy test on Father’s Day that year. We were cautiously optimistic that our sadness would finally be gone, and the desire of our hearts was just on the horizon. And then I got the call that my baby was dying. My HCG levels were dropping. Ironically, it felt like a gut punch to hear that phone call. After all the hormones we were injecting into my body left me, I felt like I was in a really weird place still, mentally and emotionally. So, I tried to rationalize that this baby I was already in love with, at a whopping 5 weeks gestation, that its poor little heart probably never started to beat. And if its heart didn’t beat, I tried to rationalize that even though I already considered all of the adopted embryos as “life,” I shouldn’t really be too sad. As if there is ever a cut-and-dried time and way to grieve. So, true to form, I pushed all those bad feelings away. I still trusted God wholeheartedly, but I felt utterly lost and alone. Remember, God created us to have emotions, but they are still only that – emotions. So I wrestled deep inside while never letting anyone in to see the tar pit of depression that my heart had become inside me.
So then I got sick – for 8 months. I went to my primary care doctor several times and made 2 or 3 trips to the emergency room over those 8 months when nobody could explain to me why my body was so miserable. I was vomiting almost daily, would get a low-grade fever by the evening every day, and headaches, moodiness, depression, and never-ceasing fatigue that seemed to weigh down not just my body and limbs but my mind, heart, and soul as well. But alas, it’s not the good news some of you might be waiting for here if you’re unfamiliar with this part of my journey. I was still not somehow mysteriously pregnant. (I had to see my baby’s sac on my toilet paper when it passed, and I was traumatized. It was so much material for what I thought would be just a tiny little thing that I would never know was anything but a little blood clot. But that’s a story for another day.) I want to thank my primary care physician, a former neurosurgeon in his 60s who has earned the happy retirement he plans to start next month. 😊 Dr. Arnold “Corky” Rey has been an amazing primary care doctor. He has always been curious and collaborative with me in my care, where we would sometimes almost have therapy in the office about things like why I wasn’t changing my diet to support my health goals with diabetes. Even though he couldn’t figure out why I was sick for so long, he believed me that I was, in fact, sick with something. After 8 months and the disappointing results of more blood work that didn’t provide any answers in the month of March 2023, knowing I was sick but unsure what to do next, I mentioned that there was a spot in my right breast that I had been keeping my eye on. It felt different than the benign tumors I regularly got, and now it had started to hurt. Almost none of those things indicate early-stage breast cancer, but that’s what they found because he had faith in my assessment of my own body and that something really was wrong with me. Dr. Rey, you’re a real one! This man saved my life from a VERY aggressive cancer by choosing to err on the side of too much testing rather than too little faith in the patient. I will be forever grateful to this man. I thank God for the years he was my doctor. ❤️
This post is getting a bit long, so I’ll try to summarize the last year thusly. I have been fighting triple-positive breast cancer, getting treatment that tore me up; treatments have been withheld and poorly managed; the cancer they told me was gone in October was active again by January. I had a bilateral mastectomy at the end of February. Now, I’m doing the 3rd of 5 weeks of 5 days a week of radiation, and I start a new chemo regimen alongside it tomorrow. I’m lonely, I’m uncomfortable, I’m weak, I’m nauseated frequently, and some days it just seems like it sucks to be alive. But God.
And I think that is where I will leave you for now. We’ll discuss the “But God” part in my next post!
Much love always,
Teri
P.S. It is so great to be back!
My Real Everyday Life 