My Toxic Lover

Karin Diamond from over at eyes peeled | always wrote this essay personifying the cancer within her which focuses on the diseased relationship that she has with her toxic lover.

A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP

If it sounds familiar it's because it's born from a blog entry I wrote back in 2011, when recently out of my allogeneic stem cell transplant and learning what it was like to be in recovery, thinking that my cancer relationship was finally over. With this reworked piece, I honed in on our complicated relationship status and reworked it to focus on the continued stresses my lover brings.

As always, if you like it, please share it on your Facebook pages, "Like" it, Tweet it, comment here or on the Huffington Post page itself. I'd love to hear your thoughts! Thanks for reading.

I'm coming to terms with having refractory cancer -- the kind that keeps on giving no matter what treatments we throw at it. I'm working at incorporating the disease into my life so that it doesn't take over my life. No matter how badly I wish it wasn't hosting inside me, it is, and I have to deal with it. The relationship that's grown between Hodgkin's Lymphoma (aka Hodgkin) and me is like one with a toxic ex-lover, the guy that just won't go away. On Facebook, our relationship status would read: "It's complicated."

Hodgkin is destructive and abusive but somehow we keep finding each other. I fall back into its strangling arms. I dig my way out with one tough treatment after the next, think I've moved on, then it -- he -- is back with a vengeance, overtaking me. There is nowhere I can hide, so I have to dance with the cancer, adapt with it. I also have to give tough love back until we can find common ground amid the battles and the tender moments.

Cancer, its treatments, and the very small world it puts me in at times, are what's been familiar for so long now. There is a sick, unwanted comfort found in that space. Having ridden out the side effects of nearly 30 chemo drugs in a variety of combinations, radiation, two autologous and a donor stem cell transplant, immunotherapy, and several early phase clinical drug trials, it's the aches that are familiar. The fatigue is familiar. The nausea, the mood swings, the foggy-headedness are familiar.

What's not familiar is when the treatments are working and I'm given time free from cancer's stranglehold. It's at these times that I don't feel Hodgkin's breath at the back of my neck, teasing with kisses and threatening a comeback. When he stops forcing himself on me, I'm able to take a deep breath without coughing, wake up without pain, or crack a joke with perfect timing. The fear of his cold touch and threatening grip subside.

I don't realize how much Hodgkin is holding me back until we're on "a break." When I have the upper hand in the relationship, all parts of me feel aligned again. It's bliss run rampant. It's then that I build up my strength to be ready for whatever our next round brings. I know from our history that he's never gone for long. Even so, when he does recoil, I ache for a scenario where while he's down I've moved so far past him that he can't catch up.

My relationship with cancer will forever be evolving. I hope for a clean break. Yet, even when we say goodbye for good, it will take a long time to heal from the forever imprints our time together has made on my being -- a tattoo inked during a four-year (and counting) bender.

Read entire article here