That's the kicker

I felt really rotten when I left the house this morning and the weather didn't help--between deep darkness and rain, I had trouble seeing the road ahead. But then I found myself sitting at my desk in my office in a building humming with possibility, and I suddenly felt the power of all that possibility. My post-treatment life starts today, and I'm excited to see what it will look like.

The final round of chemotherapy was tough, leaving me weak and wasted for the rest of the week. But yesterday I found the energy to go for a walk, and I also came to a decision: if I want to restore some measure of normalcy to my life, I need to stop thinking of myself as a sick person. This won't be easy. After all, every time I look in the mirror, I am reminded of the way cancer treatment has ravaged my body. This morning I called my husband over to admire a long hair, although "long" is a relative term--it was maybe an inch long, curly, and perfectly gray, but it was a sign that my body can grow something aside from cancer cells.

But if I don't want to think of myself as a sick person, I'm also not ready to think of myself as "healthy." I certainly don't feel healthy right now, thanks to persistent shortness of breath and lack of energy and some mental confusion. I could adopt the prevalent cancer cliche and call myself "a survivor," but that feels too passive. "Recovering" is certainly more active, but it sounds as if I'm in a 12-step program overcoming an addiction to chemotherapy, which is ridiculous.

I thought long and hard over the right word to describe my current condition, and it finally occurred to me that the word has been with me for months, ever since my cancer-kicking posse provided me with two theme songs called "Kicking Cancer's Butt" (read it here and here). I'm alive and kicking, kicking my way down the long dark rainy road, a road that might look dim right now but that leads to possibility.