stubbornness or grace

Katherine's Blog

Previously… Reality sets in for Katherine’s mom and hard questions about Katherine’s invitation to other women arise. Her sister Tricia arrives at the house with her cat, Penelope and their dad’s guns.

October 2 2029 - blog post

I actually think the world really ended in 2025.

It ended in a doctor’s office. A tall woman with a valiantly empathetic expression told me my cancer was stubborn. That not all cancers respond to the treatment plan. That biopsies could ‘seed’ cancer along the path of the needle.

The thing I remember most was being told that percentages for survival weren’t commonly given for my type of cancer – ovarian – because there were so many variables, so many incalculable factors.

I was told that my attitude was important, was everything, really.

And if that’s what my chances are based on, I thought, I guess this is really it. I never was good with positivity. When my cancer got misdiagnosed as anxiety and stress, I really worked on my attitude. I did. I meditated, I joined the 5am club to get more out of the day, I learned healthy self-talk. I told myself that if anxiety was behind the debilitating cramping and bloating in my abdomen, then it was my job to heal myself.

All the while, my cancer had been spreading.

So maybe you can imagine my challenging relationship with being told that the cure was in my attitude.

I left the oncologist’s appointment with a new file organizer, pre-filled with pamphlets about chemo (mouth sores?), radiation (liquid diarrhea?), other illnesses that cancer can cause that may not seem connected (thrombosis?), and many other subjects I would pick through when I had the time for a little self-harm.

As I walked out of the cancer centre and into the main body of the hospital, I saw people rushing in every different direction but never to where I had come from. Cancer is the slowest emergency. All through the building, babies were being born, hopefully alive. Strokes were being treated, hopefully expeditiously. Hospital lunches delivered, bedpans emptied, frightened nerves soothed. Everyone had a crisis and it was no one’s job to give a shit about mine.

I’d parked far away like I always do at the hospital, leaving the closer spots for those who need them, always arriving early anyway and not minding the extra distance. I watch one foot land in front of the other, telling myself to pay attention. This matters. What if the cancer spreads to my bones and I lose my legs to amputation? What if the chemo and radiation make me so ill I’ll need to be wheeled to the car? What if I don’t value this moment and every ensuing moment with such verve and fervour that I never forget what it means to be truly alive?

But watching my feet doesn’t make me feel alive. It just reminds me I might die. That’s what the oncologist couldn’t say. She couldn’t say this wasn’t going to kill me. “We’re going to throw everything at it,” she’d said. “We’re going to fight this with you.”

I was at war, I realized. I’d been conscripted into a battle I very well could lose and the weapons would burn and poison and the battlefield was my body, my enemy was myself.

In the driver’s seat, I expected to cry. The entire walk, step after step, I’d held back tears. But then, safely ensconced, both hands on the steering wheel, seatbelt snug against my swollen belly, I couldn’t access any tears. It felt like I’d never had them, had never cried before. The concept was comically odd.

Fleetingly, I wondered what my ex-girlfriend was doing. Funny, instead of wishing for the comforting presence of another person, I just felt so glad we’d broken up. Glad I didn’t have to deal with someone asking me how I felt, or deal with how someone else felt.

In fact, I thought at the time, I didn’t have to tell anyone about this. I considered the option. My mom knew I’d had an MRI after the ultrasound and CT scans didn’t give the doctors the information they needed. I could tell her the MRI was inconclusive too. I could tell her the doctors gave me the all clear, false alarm. My sister, too – I’d have to lie to her. My mom might accept what I told her but my sister would ask too many questions. She wouldn’t let up about the very real symptoms I’d been experiencing for the better part of a year.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t take from them – or myself – the time I had left, however short it may be. I couldn’t die a liar, I knew. But the temptation to keep it all to myself was strangely powerful.

As I sat in the car, ignition off, imagining what going through cancer alone must be like, I had a sudden vision of myself as a celestial body. An energetically spherical star or planet, massive and unarguably alive. An entire system with a fatal failure. I saw myself as the Earth, the breathing lungs of the ocean tugged on by the moon, in and out. I was struck, as if physically, by the knowing that the Earth was a living being, just as I am, and that the Earth is in grave danger, like myself.

I’m not prone to visions, in case you’re wondering, nor grandiose comparisons that when written feel both trite and delusional. This was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, or since. It’s been four years since that diagnosis, four years since I sat in my car for over an hour being swept by the notion that I was the Earth and we were dying. As unbelievable as it seemed, I couldn’t find any evidence that it was not true.

I got through it, of course. In a way. Most of me got through it. Not all of me made it. My ovaries, my uterus, my fallopian tubes, my cervix, part of my colon, my cecum, my appendix, chunks of the fat of my belly, all were excised and incinerated. All through the aggressive treatment, I followed climate news. Made sure I acknowledged how bad things were. I grieved the insects and the major fauna as they one-by-one fell away, x’ed out by the relentless heating. Killings without murderers. Everyone’s and no one’s fault. No one accountable, no one exonerated.

How could I not compare this disaster to the one happening inside me? The analogy was so obvious it screamed. I could not make life. The parts of me, the physical parts, that could create life had been removed to save mine.

What if the Earth was the same? No longer hospitable to life. Nothing left but to live out the rest of our days, hoping they are gentle, if not numerous.

The Earth and me, in hospice together.

“This cancer is stubborn,” the oncologist would say again, years later after thirteen rounds of chemo and 35 radiation sessions. “You have to be stubborn, too.”

Or, I thought, I can just go in grace.