Breast Cancer Chronicles: Finding the EASE Within Disease

2 chemo infusions down, 16 to go. Tomorrow I'll get my third and final infusion of this first "round" of infusions. Each round consists of 3 infusions so all in all I'll go to the hospital 18 times for this chemotherapy over the next 6 months. 18 times. My perspective can shift from day to day and at times it seems like 18 times in 6 months? No problem. Other times those 18 visits feel like a mountain I have to climb. Today I'm somewhere in between the two, stuck right in the middle of "hey this isn't so bad" and "are you kidding me? THIS is what my life look like?".  There's not always a  rhyme or reason for these shifts in mood and perspective, sometimes it's just the side of the bed I wake up on, other times it is decidedly not just the side of the bed I wake up on. Sometimes it's the weight of everything I deal with bearing down on my shoulders. That invisible weight that can't be seen by others but can be felt by me.

Tomorrow begins my third time entering chemotherapy and I am having a WHOLE lot of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand I am very excited to start because in my case we know that chemo has worked in the past. It brought me back from the brink last year and I am confident it will again this year. But what I know for a fact is that chemo is not a cure.  It has never been a cure and it will never be a cure. And those aren't the words of a girl who has read too many alternative healing books. Those words came straight from my oncologist when I asked him what is the point in doing this again if every year or so I have to lose all my hair and give up my life for 6 months? Honestly, what kind of life is that? His response was "Because you're young, and chemo has never been, won't ever be, and isn't now a cure. But it will keep you alive, and I want to keep you alive until we see one." Needless to say he convinced me to once again go into chemotherapy, and he rega