Survival Rate

This time last year I was in the hospital.

I had just recovered from what has to be my worst nightmare--a squatty imp was sitting on my chest suffocating me, an image straight out of Fuseli's Night Mare--only to wake up and find that I had just survived, or maybe I was still living through, my worst nightmare.

Earlier that year, at the top of 2006, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. It looked easy enough to manage at first, but then proceeded to scare the shit out of me as a conization turned into a radical hysterectomy. We had just spent the past year trying to have our second child. Miscarriage after miscarriage was frustrating enough. Now, this, My Cancer, would put an end to that.

This time last year, I was mad that I couldn't have more children, that we didn't catch this earlier, that I could die from this--and that the doctor who came in that morning for his rounds with his gaggle of grinning interns just smiled at me while I cried.

This time last year, I didn't know if there would be a this time next year.

I don't know how I feel about this anniversary. I thought I'd be happy, elated, cupcaking it through the rest of the week. I'm alive and cancer free after all. But I guess I still have some that ol' bitterness about. I don't know that I particularly like feeling grateful about being alive. I thought old age and the first hints of death would sneak up on me through bad vision and knees. I might have preferred just being oblivious.

And I'm suspicious of good news, of all-clears. Just because I made it through this year, just because it was "just cervical cancer," that doesn't mean I'll make it through the next. Even though the cancer is gone, it still echoes.