tiny tats.

When they radiate you, they do it in a big, loud machine called a "linear accelerator." You hop up on the tray, and lay down, and they line up their laser guides with the marks they've tattooed onto your skin in black ink. Then they get the heck out of there (because this stuff isn't good for your body, just like it isn't good for your cancer), and the accelerator starts to whir, and thwack, and thump. The red light above the door flickers on, "In Progress." You don't feel anything, except for extreme tiredness after a few sessions.

I felt the tattoos, though. They happened so fast. One moment I'm in the doctor's office, then, "Why don't you just go down now and get set up for the treatments?" Suddenly, at closing time, and still a little dazed from the diagnosis, there's some guy with an ink gun measuring my rear-end, murmuring, "This will only take a second. You're going to feel a pinch." He tattooed three little dots onto me, one on the side of each hip, and one on my lower back. I remember thinking about those terrible numbers they branded on at death camps. When I walked back out to a darkened, empty lobby, I threw a feeble joke to my Dad--when this is all over, I can turn them into mermaids, and dragons, and a picture of my mother. I think he smiled.

I tried to find those dots yesterday. I shouldn't have. I found one, and it made me so sick I knew I'd probably never look for them again. I hope that's not true. Some day, I hope to make peace with my tattoos.

I was reading in the Psalms the other day, and I came across these famous lines: "When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

 Reading scripture PC (post-cancer) is a very different affair than reading it BC. Words that once were nice, or sweet, or mildly reassuring take on entirely different levels of intensity and meaning. These words have become something of an anthem for me, in dealing with the physical aspects of my cancer and surgery. "Your eyes saw my unformed body" becomes, "I saw your cancer, I saw those cells, I knew them." My days being ordained and written in advance tells me that God knew each doctor's appointment, each phone call, and biopsy, and test. There's nowhere this cancer can go that God hasn't been, and no twist this story can take that will surprise Him.

"Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?"

Thankfully, nowhere.

My dots, they can't flee either. God knew them before the creation of the world, the day I got them-ordained, set out for me. Somehow, there's comfort in that.

He sees, and knows, and ordains even the tiniest things in my life.

had it and have it.

I had cancer.  I beat it.  I have it.  Because I don't know how to live without it.  Not yet, anyway.

That's the thing about being a new cancer survivor.  Like being a new cancer patient, it's new.  I didn't know then how to deal with the people around me asking questions, and trying to help.  I don't know now how to deal with them either, how happy they are, how ready to forget it all, because they don't have as much to remember.

It's not just about the people.  In fact, very little of this survivor stuff is about how to deal with loved ones.  It's more about myself.

I want to forget, because the stuff is horrific to me.  I think about it, and I cry.  Sometimes, I can't stop crying.  It's too much.  And it's not that I don't have hope, or that I don't have God, because I have both in tremendous measure.  But when you live on several months of stress hormones and vomiting, you're going to have a little post-trauamtic stress going.

I also want to remember.  Because I am fully and joyfully convinced that there are people in my future who need me to remember.  There are girls who need me to know that when they come to me, when God sends them, my heart should be strong and broken, and above words like, "You're gonna be fine!  Just trust in the Lord."  Those words are good and true, but so hollow to the ears of a new diagnosis.  It's possible that those girls will need my tears.  I don't want to leave those back here, when I need them ahead.

So there's a balance.  A strength to be found.  Gradually, I guess, my stress will come back to baseline.  Already, as I dig into scripture, He gives me truth--words that help me to bind my cancer experience to my life now in a way that makes sense, and builds my hope for the future.

My biggest hope is that some day I can say simply: I had cancer.  I beat it.