Hormones Shmormones

I really didn’t expect this. Well, frankly, ANY of this…but specifically the emotional roller coaster that seems to be coming up now. Why now? It makes no sense. A million years ago when I was diagnosed with breast cancer (yes, to me last fall feels like a million years ago) I went through a litany of medical tests (see previous snarky blog posts) and one of them was to test if my cancer cells were hormone receptive or not.

In layman’s terms what it means is that they wanted to know if my hormones egg on cancer; if my cancer cells feed on and grow and multiply with the help of hormones. The answer was yes. I am hormone receptor positive.

Which meant absolutely nothing to me. It meant that as my surgeon told me this, she got a cold, blank stare from me. While her face said this was something I should be concerned about, my face said, “I don’t have a damned medical degree, so tell me like I’m 5!”

And she did. The first step, she said, was to get rid of my birth control device; it’s an estrogen-releasing device that needs to go. And so it did.

The next step is for me to take five years of a hormone suppressant. This is supposed to vastly decrease the chances of breast cancer returning.

At this point in the game, I have the least amount of hormones in my body than I’ve experienced in decades.

So why? Why am I such an emotional mess. Isn’t estrogen supposed to be to blame for us women having mood swings and being so emotional? So then, wouldn’t it make sense that if we take estrogen out of the picture, we’re more moodily-stable? Less emotional?

So why? Why am I crying in the car after making a trip to the craft store and finding out they don’t have a single skein of the yarn I need to finish a project?

Why am I crying on the floor while my dog licks my face so much I can’t tell where the tears end and the doggy slobber begins?

I’m crying over old battles I fought and lost. I’m crying over old battles I fought and won, but still feel a loss. I’m crying over the battles I never fought.

And it hits me. I’m so fucking tired of doing battle! And this!! This is one more God-damned battle. A big one. It feels like I had 49 years of practice battles to ready me for the big one. And I’m in it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving up. I didn’t come this far to just sit on the bench.

But when does my life become un-battle-y? When all this is behind me, I want to just sit on my ass and chill.

I want to lay in a field of daisies and do absolutely nothing. Don’t misunderstand; I don’t want to be pushing up the daisies, I just want to strip off all the armor and lay there in the sunshine and flowers, naked and un-battle-ready.