[2022-10-18] My cancer journey
Today, I added a new section to my Categories page: My Cancer Journey. I selected posts that captured the major steps associated with my ovarian cancer, my perianal skin cancer, and my efforts to reduce my risk of breast cancer given the mutation in my BRCA2 gene: first day of health leave, significant visits with my oncologists, surgery for ovarian cancer, each round of chemotherapy, genetic testing, ovarian cancer maintenance medication, consultations regarding a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy, surgery for perianal skin cancer, the start and end of radiation treatments.
As important as my blog is to keep the people who care about me informed of my progress, it's proving to be equally valuable as a repository of information for people who reach out to me for details on my cancer journey. It would be both time-consuming and challenging for me to try to document my cancer journey more than two years after it began. Moreover, I do not have a memory for details or the ability to recall exactly what people said to me and how I felt in the midst of my diagnosis and treatment. I have a tendency to remember difficult phases in my life as less painful than they might have felt at the time. And if asked to share my cancer story, I would inevitably shorten the story to the point that it would lose the nuances of the ups and downs I experienced along the way.
I appreciate receiving requests for information like the one I got today because they spur me to go back into my vast library of posts to pull out the ones that answer not just the question of the day but similar queries I am likely to get in the future.
We all have storehouses of information and assets that others would appreciate accessing if they knew they existed and could easily put their hands on items of interest: albums of photos, shelves of books, collections of collectibles, pages of diaries, crates of music albums, storerooms of antiques and years worth of memories. Putting order in a loose assembly of our belongings benefits ourselves as much as others.
I know how difficult it can be to get started. It took me months to come up with a way of organizing my posts into categories that others could use. But, having now started, I'm finding it easier to chip away at the project, adding a few entries to the listing every few days.
