"I will wonder on...."

Now that I'm back to working full-time and I'm not all cancer, all the time, my life is beginning to resemble that of a real life.  However, every time I have felt that way, something has come along to pull the rug from underneath me (see: double-freaking-mastectomy).  I've been back to work for a month now, and I'm probably a month away from my last surgery to finish off the reconstruction, which I will call....

The Boob Finale.  

I really hope this surgery is the last one for awhile because frankly, I'm sick of the hospital, dealing with anesthesia and becoming a "regular" at the hospital.  Next month will mark my second cancer-versary, and I'll probably have The Boob Finale before then.  That will be five, FIVE, surgeries within two years, and lord, I am tired.  

I'm so tired.

My body is just so unrecognizable from my neck down to my belly button.  From my five surgeries, I have 11 new scars on my body.  The double mastectomy added six to the Scar Count.  My chest looks like a road map to hell, with  my boobs the Mountains of Pain.  I go through periods, and I'm apparently in one of them now, where I just don't recognize my own body on the inside and out.  I consider times like this mourning periods where I miss what I used to look and feel like.  

I miss happy, care-free Lara, who occasionally had to deal with anxiety attacks and no drive to succeed.  Now, I feel like I should constantly be doing something, anything.  I feel extremely driven to finish my cancer memoir so I will have put something out into the universe, a legacy of some kind.  What if something bad happens to me again - will anyone know I have existed if the Big Bad C word comes back and I'm done for?  I have to get my mind off things and concentrated on something.  

Depression is a helluva beast to try to live with and hopefully conquer.  I'm naive enough to think I can overcome this depression and try to regain some of that sense of wellness I had before the cancer hammer came smashing down.  When I think too much about what's happened to me in the last two years, I could cry for days and not get off the couch.  (Poor Boomer will lay next to me whenever I get this way, like, "It's okay, Mom.  No need to be sad when I'm here.")  

I'm hoping that after the Boob Finale that a lot of this fear and anxiety about my mortality will subside, and I can just live.  I don't want to live a life, fearing death.  Nobody should live like that.