It’s back and I’m trying to stay calm.

• I’m alive in this moment.
• I’m surrounded by friends.
• It’s a beautiful fall in Bend and the leaves are slowly giving up their green for bright shouts of gold and red.
• I’m not in any extra pain, yet.
• I can do this.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuuuuck (sorry mom. These are the only appropriate words right now.)

The cancer is back.

I didn’t expect to be here, even though I was told I’d probably be here. I was living in a world where cancer was in my past. One where I was dealing with the after-effects, with the damage it did.

I thought it was. Now it is.

We caught it early. I can’t feel it. But do I? Now that I know, can I feel it growing? Can I feel it licking and chomping on my bones again?

Almost. If I try hard enough.

And why my bones, AGAIN? This lung cancer that leaves the lung alone, delights in my sweet skeleton. Just in time for Halloween, or so all the in-store holiday displays tell me.

I have three growths, or minimal low-level progressions. Like I said, we caught it early. Hoooyaa. One is in my upper spine – that pesky C7, you know, the one that already had a tumor and is collapsed and potentially the agent of my ongoing chronic pain. There is one in my lower spine, the L3, which has been bothering me this summer when I do child’s pose in yoga – and here I thought child’s pose would help stretch that ache away. And one on my hip. Correction, in my right hip socket. Deep in the pocket where the magic happens. The magic: I think about walking, and I walk; the hip socket swings my leg where it needs to go. Walking is how I exist. We definitely need to get that one under control.

I have cancer.

I have cancer again.

Fuck.

What now?

Can I still go to Europe next month? I was going to walk another Camino, this one a short 70-miles into Santiago, and then go spend a week in London. Can I do that? Is it a good idea?

I told myself this year would be one of travel, but also that my plans would be penciled in, ready to be erased in case my health needed me home, but now that I’m looking at my packing list, and looking at my scan results, I want to go. I really want to go.

Whew. The doctors want me to go too. They say hike the 70-miles, have a good time. We’ll start chemo again when you get back.

Chemo again? Go ahead? Is my quality of life so important that you want me to go? Is the cancer growth so minimal and slow that I have time? Is my time short enough that you want me to live it up? Will this be my life now? Remission for a while, progression for a while, chemo for a while, and repeat until when? My body gives up?

Strangely, a few hours after the phone call came that the cancer is back, I was hungry. Ravenous. I wanted to eat and eat and eat. It was like my body realized it was still alive and wanted to be fed. A dying body doesn’t want food. A body about to be thrown into the chaos of chemo does. Eating is the way I can show the cancer that I’m still alive, that I’m not going anywhere.

Traveling to Spain and London shows my cancer that I’m still alive, that I’m going to live damn it, and am going to have fun doing it.

Does it matter if I eat my broccoli sprouts if the cancer just comes back? Do I have any agency at all here?

The next day I had a party to go to. I put on some mascara and lip gloss, wore clothes that weren’t athleisure, cranked up some French rock music and, drove with the windows down while the wind whipped my hair and the sun reassured my face. I am alive right now.

I partied (as one can only do at a conservation non-profit anniversary party, ha!) I laughed, ate, danced, and when asked the inevitable question, I said: “I’m doing great today!” because I was.

How can I explain that knowing the cancer is back has made everything sharper around the edges?

Then the next day came, and the news settled in like bedraggled and beached manatees. I struggled to walk, to get out of bed, to get out of the recliner.

I really am wonderful some days.

I really am a hallow husk the next ones.

But I am.

Thank you Sylvia Plath and Maggie O’Farrell.

I am, I am, I am.