Therapy

It started about six months ago, an occasional spasm of pain in my left armpit. Unpredictable and fleeting, the pain is severe enough to be noticeable but not so much that it was debilitating.

When I look it up on Web MD, which is usually pretty fatalistic in its diagnoses, nothing comes up, but because it is on my “cancer side,” I mention it when I go in for my annual mammogram a few weeks later. The nurse checks me out pretty thoroughly, the films are clear, and she suggests it is probably a muscle spasm.

The pain persists, so a month later I mention it to my sister, who is a nurse practitioner. She thinks it sounds like a muscle spasm and gives me a few tips to address the symptoms, none of which I do. I figure that anything muscular can take care of itself.

Months later, the pain has not abated, so I make an appointment with my doctor, or rather, the nurse practitioner at my doctor’s office.  Like everyone else, she asks me questions, feels me up, and has no answers, but since the pain is in proximity to the place where lymph nodes had been removed 15 years earlier, she suggests I make an appointment to see my oncologist.

By now I have already invested about a million times more time and energy into this than merited, but I dutifully call the oncologist, with whom I have had no contact in ten years. I am booked to see the nurse practitioner, who—like all the nurse practitioners I have consulted up to now—is absolutely wonderful.  She recommends physical therapy, an ultrasound, and an MRI to try to figure out what’s up in my pit. She also asks if I would be interested in genetic testing, something we had considered years ago but I put off.

In addition to the annoyance of all the cost and time involved, I’m increasingly aware that I am being sucked back to cancer world, a place that I thought I left behind long ago but that is in fact always thisclose. No matter how far you move forward, once you’ve been to cancer world, it’s intertwined in the fiber of who you are, and it doesn’t take much to pull you back to a dark place of fear and helplessness and endless nausea.

Although it’s fear the drives me to pursue the additional tests, I book the physical therapy to prove that I am fine. My physical therapist, Amy, works exclusively with women at risk for lymphedema which, apparently, includes me. (Seriously, I didn’t know that.) Amy assesses the range of motion in my arm and concludes that there is plenty of room for improvement. As I lay on her table, her fingers find tight knots of scar tissue that I didn’t know were there. The pain makes me cry, but I can tell it is helping. And as she presses deeper, I know that the tears come because she is touching emotional scars as well.

Amy talks to distract me. By our third session, she begins to tell me her own cancer story, which makes my story look like a day at the beach. At age 38 she is a three-time survivor. She’s undergone genetic testing and had her young children tested as well. They all have the gene, and are doing all they can to be on guard. She lives with cancer every day; it’s not just a bad memory tied up in a knot under her skin.

I want to live my life looking forward, not backward, but sometimes there is no moving forward until you deal with the past. My cancer story is only a small part of who I am, but it was a significant turning point.  I don’t want to live in that world, but sometimes it’s necessary to revisit it and to continue to learn from it.

I might be ready to pursue genetic testing. Whatever the results, it can’t be as painful as physical therapy! And it might be helpful to my kids and other family members. So, deep breath…and one step at a time.

And the spasm in my arm? Yeah, we’ve still got no answers on that. But I’m learning to live with it.