Day 326: Life Goes On

This will probably be the shortest blog I've written since I've started this thing, except for the BRCA results blog. My life has just been way too hectic to write about anything, or even to sleep or eat normally, in the last week or so. Once some of the dust settles I will have quite a long blog to write, because I definitely think it's interesting how the everyday excitements and stresses of life become complicated by a cancer diagnosis. You just think about things that don't enter other people's minds in the same situation.

One of the things that has happened is that I have decided to change jobs internally at the Fed. It's a long complicated story, especially because many of you don't know what I do for a living anyway, and if I described this new thing, it would not sound that different. My title remains the same. My boss will eventually change. I may or may not keep my office. But the decision was a huge one for me, and ultimately meant that I will be doing something very new, outside of my comfort zone, rather than transitioning into something else that I have years and years of experience doing. I will, if I am successful, become an expert in financial markets and all that means: derivatives, trading, wholesale payments, switching, etc. Will I be able to do this? Who knows? Am I afraid of doing this? No, not at all. I've done scarier, more foreign and uncomfortable things, all quite recently. It was very stressful to decide--let's not pretend that just because you have dealt with cancer everything slides right off of you. That is too much to ask, that people give up their normal emotions along with everything else. But there is fear of the unknown at work, and then there is fear of the unknown after death, and the two really don't exist in the same universe of problems.

I'll write about all the other stuff later, so as not to jinx anything that's going on over here. Since this is the TMI blog, I will update on the fact that my period was not a fluke, which is something I secretly feared when I wrote that happy blog about it returning. Since I was on antibiotics for the mastitis, I worried that the bleeding was just a weird side effect, since that can happen with Cipro on rare occasions. Apparently not--here it is, 3 weeks later. Yikes. It scares me to think that my periods would be so frequent so quickly after cancer treatment, since they don't understand how hormones affect triple negative cancer. Oh well. I guess my body is just fighting like mad to get back to normal.

And for the most part, it is normal. I'm mostly normal--we all are. We just have those strange moments at our house when we talk about the future, about exciting things, and then I say, and if I die, this would provide you and the kids more security! Or Gabe says, I can't imagine making this change if you won't be here! And then we kind of bitch-slap each other and move on. So stay tuned.