My gypsy summer//two years post-op

So I've been calling this my gypsy summer. In June I had to move again (early 20s b.s.) and I didn't have a lot of funds to get another place. My family and friends rose up around me and said, "You can stay with me." Can't believe it. So I sold or gave away a LOT of my possessions (I love possessions) and put the rest in storage. And I stayed with my boyfriend's family for about six weeks, and I stayed with my grandma after that, and then a long-since planned 10 day trip to North Carolina to visit my brother and his beautiful family. Then a week in the SF bay area with my cousin's family, and now I'm in South Lake Tahoe at my dear friend's house for three weeks. It's been a whirlwind! I work from home, so I've been saving a lot of money, and having a pretty cool adventure. I still taught yoga in the Sacramento area up until this month. I return to teaching in October and can't wait. I'm getting an apartment with a girlfriend at that time too. So home is on the horizon!

What I love is that this time of instability and transience couldn't have happened any other time but now. I'm so grateful that I always had stability during the nitty gritty times of surgeries and treatment in 2012. When I first discovered the lump on my neck and this journey began, I lived in one apartment. Then I moved, and in that next apartment everything happened. Diagnosis, second diagnosis, first surgery, low iodine diet and radioactive iodine quarantine, second surgery, physical trauma, emotional trauma, rinse, repeat. So when I moved out of that place, which I could never actually afford from the beginning, I told Johnny how weird it would be to leave the place, because this was the space where I had cancer. He reminded me, "You had cancer in your old place too." And he's right. I had cancer slowly growing in my body for years before I even moved out on my own. So anyway, all this talk about apartments I guess is pertinent to me because of how I am. I'm very nostalgic, sentimental, and also "homey" I guess. I love having a place to call my own. I have an excellent memory and I seriously remember almost everything that's ever happened to me. Dates, places, I store it all away. The book The Secret Language of Birthdays pegs me as "The Commemorator." I don't do horoscopes or any of that, but this book is completely right about me.

So anyway, if you were wondering why I was examining my experience of thyroid cancer in the context of different apartments, that's why. In my mind, I go back to that old apartment all the time. Today marks two years since my last surgery. And today I hiked 13 miles, more than I have ever hiked in a day, and what kept me going was the memory of the old me. My past self from 2012 who laid on a couch, in pain, with a busted neck, unable to do anything but play with my new iPad and frivolously waste an inheritance on online shopping. I was energized on my hike today by the memory of the old me who couldn't hike. The old me, recovering from surgery and trying to sort out what the hell just happened to my life, couldn't go anywhere. Shoot, I didn't have a bowel movement for over two weeks! So it's really important for me to remember where I've come from. When I have a shitty attitude in traffic, or I expect better customer service at a store, or I spend hours anxious and worried about things I'm not trusting the universe to take care of, I have squandered the hours, and I'm useful to no one. None of it matters. I better make my time here mean something. I don't know why I had this experience at 19 and 20 years old, but it has now come to shape who I am, and played a big part in my development. I say this all the time, I don't know what I was put on this Earth for, I may not know my purpose, but I know what my purpose is not--I was not put here to merely exist. I wasn't meant to suffer or languish. Today I feel my purpose is help others and serve God any way I can. I just want to be an instrument of peace, and I am, as often as possible. When you really really are convinced you could die at any time and you make a paycheck doing something unfulfilling, for me, I had to arrive at a purpose, something to focus on, something to give my heart to. Or else what is the point?!

Here was my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in South Lake Tahoe.

So I guess those are my reflections on being two years post-op. Physically, I still live with left shoulder pain that visits me every other day. Every morning I wake up and check in with my shoulder and how it's feeling. A lot of times I sleep wrong and my shoulder is sooooo sore. Unfortunately I have no control over how I sleep. I joke that I need to be tied down. The left side of my neck, my left ear, and the left side of my scalp still have just distant feeling, still slightly numb. It will probably always be that way. It's not unlike women I know who've had C-sections; their incision sites are also somewhat numb. So I'm not a science wonder, but I talk about the numbness because it is new to me. It's one of many things I wasn't prepared for. It, along with emotional distress, were not in the pamphlet I received when I was diagnosed.

In case you forgot how miserable I looked in the hospital after my neck dissection, here's a reminder...

Here's my scar now. Two incisions from thyroidectomy and lateral neck dissection, plus a drain scar. Original incision and drain scar are both hypertrophic, meaning they are puffy and didn't heal all that well. I'm a little red from the hike today :)

It's amazing how healed it is. It's like, people who meet me now, don't know what I've been through. But if you knew me or saw me back then, there was no question something happened to me. It's this whole new world, where not everyone sees a big red gash in my neck. I can just blend in. And when it seems appropriate, I can tell people about what I've been through. Hey, does this mean I'm taking a little more control? Taking the reigns? Deciding who knows that I used to walk around looking like I had my throat slit? That's cool with me.

Happy two years post-op to me. Thank God it's not how it used to be.