Shortly before I turned 37 and my older daughter turned 3, I was diagnosed with breast cancer: stage III of IV. A year later—chemo, surgery and radiation behind me—I was ready to return to my former life. Little did I know that recovery also has its stages. The main difference? On the other side of treatment, bigger numbers are better.

Stage I: Increased Surveillance


My marathoner friend was in Boston last spring when the bombs went off, and for several months afterward, whenever he lit his janky gas grill, the resulting pop made him jump. Cancer is like that. For a while, ordinary things feel dangerous. That scar tissue/headache/out-of-the-blue lower back pain could be evidence of recurrence, right? Should you call your oncology nurse? Schedule a visit to the mammography center? (Recurrence anxiety loves a doctor's appointment.) But then you start to wonder where diligence ends and paranoia begins. And after one too many panicky speed dials, you start to fear it's the latter—which is why this stage also involves pretending you're no longer living from scan to exam to blood draw. The rest of the world, especially the rest of the world who loves you, wants you to stop being shocked by sudden noises. They want you to let it be over, come back to life, even celebrate, whether you're ready or not.

Stage II: The Slip-Slide


How is your heart? Your bone density? Your recall? During active treatment, I would have traded every one of them for a clear mammogram. (For all I knew, I had.) Slowly, though, I stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder, where survival is everything, to a more demanding place, where I wanted bones that would take me the distance, not to mention my old hair and eyelashes. In other words, I began to hope for more from life than life itself. I wanted to be comfortable and attractive. And come to think of it, I wanted my Irish luck back. I realized I'd entered a new stage the day I got my first post-treatment parking ticket. "Un-be-f*cking-lievable!" I scream-whispered, my daughters trailing behind me, arguing over who had to walk the dog when we got home. "Give me a break!" Just a month earlier, my two girls had been everything and enough. If only I could see them graduate, marry, become moms themselves, that's all I could ever ask for. And then...there I was, asking for a bit more. Could I see them safely into their adulthoods, and could they not bicker and could we not get a $65 ticket for underfeeding the meter by three minutes? Could I have those things, too? This, I realized, made me no better than my girls, who begged for a dog, who loved the dog with such passion for the first, oh, 24 hours, but for whom, soon enough, the dog became not so exciting. My survival, which had once been cause for Dom Pérignon, was now not quite enough of "a break."

Next: What women often gain during the final stage of recovery

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