Author: Molly Kochan O

Knowing about the unknown

~ Molly Kochan O ~ Leave a comment

lounge

I try not to look at statistics or prognoses. According to what I’ve read, I don’t have much time. But I’m young, healthy (considering) and always looking to improve, both myself and my condition. Everyone is different and none of us knows how long we have to live. There’s always that proverbial bus that could hit us any minute.

With this stage IV stuff, there is a constant awareness of the unknown. It’s an unknown that’s a part of everyone’s lives although I wasn’t particularly aware of it pre-diagnosis. The idea of mortality or even being confronted with it was a vague idea that happened to old people and relatives of friends.

There’s something about my ignorant meandering that I miss. That’s not to say I was happy wandering through life with no concept of its finality. Because I wasn’t. I struggled for a long time with finding my voice, finding a sense of belonging. Wondering where is my corner of the world. But there was a kind of haze over things that made existence a directionless dream for me. I didn’t know it then, but I do now.

Once I knew this feeling, the feeling that not just life, but MY life, was finite, I couldn’t unknow it. And when I say know, I don’t mean intellectual knowing. It’s a to-the-core kind of knowing that changed my emotional DNA.

Looking at how I lived my life before, it’s sad to say that there is a Universal push in this diagnosis that was much needed. It’s really too bad that it took something as big as this to give me perspective and an innate sense of structure that I had trouble attaining. I can feel the finish line even though I don’t know where I am in the race and have found a new drive to run as best as I can.

While I am not grateful for cancer or even the “gifts” it brings, I am grateful that I can recognize its lessons. Now my hope is that as a cast sets a bone, this diagnosis will set a new drive in place so that when I am cancer free (and I plan to be), I can continue to operate with this energy and bring it to everything I do.

Flirting with IVF

~ Molly Kochan O ~ Leave a comment

wheelchair

Back when I was flirting with IVF, I remember sitting in the waiting room of the fertility office. It was cold and sterile, at least is in my memory. And as I sat there I felt like I had failed as a woman. I was as cold and sterile as the chair I was sitting in.

To make matters worse, the fertility doctor had a giant portrait of his family (wife and two kids) hanging in his office. Now when I say giant, think big and then multiply it about 20 times. They were not there to represent an IVF success story, it was just the doctor’s aesthetic. Their little eyes (giant only because of the size of the picture) looked at me as if to say “you couldn’t do this.”

Needless to say, my IVF journey was short lived for many reasons. I wasn’t that fertile anymore due to chemo, plus taking hormones would have introduced too much risk to my health. But what stood out for me most was the sense that I was no longer a real woman. It was a primal loss of desirability.

To get to the other side I had to grieve my ability to have a biological child. I also had to address my sexuality. Take a look at what made me feel desirable and tap into a part of myself that was all too easy to ignore…until it wasn’t.

I found creative tools to do that – from sexy selfies to flirting with strangers online – the details of which I will share at some point. There was a lot of going from the outside in. Focusing on the external to get to the internal. I had to overcome judgements of vanity and admit that I wanted to be attractive not just to myself but to other people. And as I gained that confidence, the confidence that other people saw me as desirable, it became less important for me to seek that kind of attention. Addressing it head on got it off my plate so I could focus on other things.

Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle with aging and have not completely let go of my desire to be attractive. But it’s not the most prominent issue I deal with anymore. My guess is it’s because I honored it and gave it a voice. When stuffing it would have only made it worse.

As far as IVF goes, I’m glad I stepped away from pursuing that. I applaud anyone who goes down that path. It’s a beautiful thing, creating life. And for those of us who can’t do it in that way, we get to find other ways to create.

It’s in my head

~ Molly Kochan O ~ 2 Comments

pill

It’s been a little over a month since my orthopedic surgery (you can read about that here). I am off crutch, have a little limp and some stiffness but overall am healing quite well. My chiropractor gave me some pelvic and sacral support today and before I left her office, she said it should help with the limping.

But walking around, I noticed I was still hobbling. So I stopped, took a moment and made an effort to walk without the hobble. And, what do you know, my body was able to stabilize pretty well without shifting my weight entirely to one side. It’s definitely not as easy or as comfortable, but doable and probably much better for my overall structure in the long run.

I’ve been walking without a limp for over 40 years and within a month of post-op healing, my body has acclimated to this way of walking even after it was useful. It struck me that it doesn’t take much for patterns to become habits to become part of how we navigate the world. That’s not to say that my limp is a bad thing and truthfully, I still have a ways to go before I am 100% limp free, but I definitely do not need to offload my entire left side anymore. It’s just going to take some effort to get there.

That moment made me wonder what else I might be holding onto because it’s familiar or easy. What else feels like a warm blanket to my brain but is not serving my best interest? Whatever it is, I’m optimistic that with some effort I can move through it.

Grief and the breast cancer diagnosis

~ Molly Kochan O ~ Leave a comment

carrots

I am starting to hit acceptance with all of this. It has been a few months of struggling to accept my path and each emotion along the way has corresponded pretty closely to the stages of grief. (I touch on that a bit in this post)

This diagnosis has felt like such a loss. Loss of how I saw my life – I had imagined having kids or even having forever to figure out what I wanted to do. Loss of parts of my body – my breasts for one and several lymph nodes. But I think there was also a profound loss of self in all of this.

I was on a path, figuring out the things that made me feel connected to myself and the rest of the world. I had forged an amazing relationship to exercise and found ways to stay grounded, both physically and spiritually. I ate well, always gravitated towards self improvement and saw myself as exceptionally healthy. And then in an instant, all of that got taken away.

I could no longer work out because the bone mets hurt almost immediately. Every waking moment was spent focusing on next steps. And I wasn’t the picture of health I had envisioned. There I was: derailed, knocked off course and the tools once used to stabilize my mood or get in touch with myself were no longer available.

I still experience the emotional palette related to grief. Some days are worse than others. But I am grateful to also be experiencing acceptance and hope alongside all of that. I think this hope is coming, in part, from feeling like I have something to say about all of this. And with that, a striving for meaning, in my diagnosis, in life has begun to form.

Molested by cancer

~ Molly Kochan O ~ 1 Comment

faucet-2

Many people who have had childhood sexual-based trauma, know the conflicting set of emotions that go along with being molested: Shame and a sense that you are special. Obviously this is something I’ve dealt with and I often wonder if some of my cancer roots lie in that past history. I touched on my walling off my breasts from the rest of me here, which could very well have been a result of sexual abuse as a kid.

There may be links between sexual abuse and breast cancer but that’s not the reason for this post. What has been rolling through my head though is that those very specific pair of emotions have cropped up again. I have a sense of shame over getting sick early on in life. As if somehow it indicates a terrible weakness, physically, spiritually. There is also that sense that I am special. That I am going through something few people go through. I am special because this genetic predator chose me. And then feeling special makes me feel ashamed all over again.

Cancer feels like a terrible violation. The body you trust to house you for this lifetime all of a sudden is doing things against your wellbeing. Of course cancer is dissimilar to the sexual predator in that it does not feel good. There is no confusion as far as that goes and no part of me that enjoys the bone aches or nausea or host of other symptoms.

I wonder if other people have these feelings or if these emotions are just in storage because of my past history. Easy feelings to pull off the shelf when something big and scary comes along. What I do know is that it makes me a victim all over again. And I don’t want to navigate this as a victim. Sure, cancer is unfair. Nobody deserves it. But being a victim and concentrating on that role seems to separate me from the life force I am meant to experience. Being a victim thwarts any attempt at creation. So today I choose to create and am willing to step out of my role as a victim and take responsibility for whatever life I have left.