The Past, The Present And The Future (Part III)

The Future

My last two entries have been about what has happened to me in the past 3 years and how that has affected me in the present, but now I have to consider what might happen in the future which is far harder to do.

At the end of the last entry I wrote about how coming to terms with having cancer is something that I am going to have to do in the future. Because for now, while I can think logically about all the things I've been through, I can't get my head around the fact that all those things have happened to me because I've got ovarian cancer. Even writing those words, I've got ovarian cancer, feels very disconnected from me as a person. And yet I am going to have to find a way to accept it and move on. I think I have got to this point by disassociating myself with the whole thing - getting ill and having all that treatment happened to another version of me, and now I'm looking to revert back to the person that existed before September 2005. Except that I know I can't do that, I have to somehow merge the two to create a new me almost. I am hoping that this will happen seamlessly in the future; that as I get better and feel stronger, and as more and more time passes without the cancer recurring, then I will gain increased perspective on the whole thing and be able to accept what has happened.

Of course, accepting you have had cancer and moving on is always going to be difficult when the threat of it coming back is always lurking. I have no idea whether or not I will get to declare that I am in remission (something you can only do after you have been clear for 5 years), but it is certainly what I'm going to aim for. I cannot predict what might happen - after all I would never have predicted that I would get cancer at 25 - I can only accept that it might come back, and hope that it doesn't. In the meantime of course, to see if there are any signs that the cancer has returned, I will continue to have check-ups and blood tests and scans. These will be every 3 months for the time being, but I will gradually move to having them every 6 months, and then finally to just one a year if all remains unchanged and healthy.

To look into the future and see the possibility of the cancer recurring is frightening, but there are other, much brighter things in the future too: being able to live a life with great friends and family, and to have a wonderful marriage with Justin. And maybe, just maybe to have a family of our own. And that is really my big hope for the future, alongside continuing to be healthy. If I stay cancer free then there really is a chance we could have children, and that would be the most amazing and brilliant thing.

So I guess that while the past 3 years have been pretty awful, and the present continues to be a bit of a struggle, the future has the potential to be really rather good!

Em