I fell three times in the last month, but I’m not broken. I have headaches now, are the two related? Maybe, maybe not. No one can say for sure. So many wrongs are overlapping at the same time and I have no idea what preceded what, what caused what, and what are simply coincidences. All of this makes me want to curl up in a ball and throw the covers over my head.

HOWEVER, for the first time I saw through this hazy state of managing my pain when my new pain psychologist said: “There is more that is right in your body than wrong.”

There is more right in my body than wrong.

I don’t have active cancer right now, I have pain.

There is more right in my body than wrong.

You will notice that I use repetition a lot in these posts, sure it’s for emphasis, but it’s also so I can get the words through my thick skull. I have been repeating her words in my head to myself for days now. I can scarcely believe them. There is more going right in my body than wrong. According to my latest brain MRI, I am stable. I’m still waiting on a Guardant Reveal blood test and a PET Scan to tell me if I’ve been in remission for a year now… but I think I still am???? (BTW, I’m VERY EXCITED for the Guardant Reveal test. It will be my first one and it detects cancer cells smaller than a PET scan can, which is great….so in essence, I think from now on I can get the blood test, and if there is cancer, then get the PET to tell us where it is.)

Other wise wisdom from my pain psychologist includes learning that I’m probably overlaying my emotional trauma on top of my physical trauma, which could explain a lot. Of course the cancer diagnosis was traumatizing. Of course ending up in a wheelchair after not dying was traumatizing. But so was watching my parents deal with a stroke, long-term care issues, late stage Alzheimer’s, their only daughter getting stage-4 cancer, and then my father’s death.

Is the pain in my brain? Most of it started escalating at the one-year anniversary of my diagnosis, which is also the anniversary of all the above.

I DO feel more robust. I do feel like I could be turning some kind of page in my health journey…The fact that I fell three times in the last month definitely helps reinforce that idea. I fell to the ground three times and stood back up again. But, I feel like a toddler, learning to walk again. I’m wobbly. I am not quite sure how to balance in this new world, not sure where the balance is. (Granted, most of the falls have also accompanied the increase in dosage of one of my pain meds, which…wait for it…causes balance issues)

But I am getting stronger. I see that now – that I needed a year in remission for my body to do what it does best: heal. In much of the last year I needed to get out of the way of my body’s ability to get stronger and avoid fall risks. I needed to act as if I’m fragile. I needed to think of walking again like I was a bull in a china shop (I’m both the bull and the china in this scenario.)

I can’t quite start bashing my way through the brush like I used to, but I can try to move in a more deliberate way in the general direction of my former activities. And that is promising!

There is more right in my body than wrong.

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I’m voicing these blog posts over on my substack now…if you want to hear me reading these, head on over and give them a listen...I’ll be recording more of my past posts in due time.