Its been over a month now and I am still trying to process all that has happened. To be honest I’m feeling a bit broken which can happen when you face one of your biggest fears. All the security I had with my “stable scans” has been rocked. There is so much unknown with this disease and its hard to come to terms with that. Loosing trust in your body can be earth shattering. I have a lot of grieving and complicated feelings to process before I can move to where I’m comfortable with living condensed again. I’m not sure if comfortable is the right word as its hard to imagine being comfortable in all this. Metastatic Breast Cancer is a roller coaster and for me its important to try to find some sort of acceptance in this journey. To learn to be kind and allow myself the time to live and process the complex feelings I have at every bend and twist. This has been a big twist and it will take some time to process.

The morning when words fell,
dark, broken and disconnected.
They drifted away on an explosive current of air,
leaving behind a path of hostile hairline fractures.

I tried to bundle segmented letters into words,
but the white page was full of foreign abstractions.
Words that vanished leaving only my confusion,
veiled in cloak of unrelated sounds.

The crow is standing on his perch,
that penetrates into my skull and my brain.
His talons tightly grip as he steals my vocabulary,
but I am not dying yet.

I tried to escape the morbid feelings that chase my mortality,
fears that quickly twist into deep seeded panic.
My eyes full of tears as they darted around the room,
searching for any discernible text.

Glancing to where we sat, the doctors huddled around a computer,
my scanned brain in the background, visible and on display.
In a tiny ER room she delivered the unwanted news,
“The breast cancer has metastasized to your brain.”

The crow is standing on his perch,
that penetrates into my skull and my brain.
His talons tightly grip as he steals my vocabulary,
but I am not dying yet.

Her face was composed and direct,
she sat across from me in street cloths with her coffee in her hand,
Her charisma and confidence was gentle and calming,
she meticulously described the procedure and my choices.

They rolled me into the brightly lit operating room,
where my head spun and floated as I drifted from consciousness.
She cut a door into my skull to remove breast cancer,
that beautiful woman who had treated me as an equal.

The crow is standing on his perch,
that penetrates into my skull and my brain.
His talons tightly grip as he steals my vocabulary,
but I am not dying yet.

I could feel the tube being pulled from my throat,
fear and panic consumed me as I called out in distress.
I was afraid for my sense of self, my words and my discourse,
as pain and discomfort had clouded my judgement.

“I am scared and anxious” I called out to the room,
as the anesthesiologist grabbed my hand and squeezed.
I closed my eyes and let tears fall down my cheeks,
the nurse gently asked, “Can you tell me your name?”

The crow has flown from his perch,
that penetrated into my skull and my brain.
In his departure my stollen vocabulary has returned,
and who I am has remained.