Probing

I went to a dentist appointment, which normally is really uneventful, and this one mostly was too. But I met this really nice old guy (83, by his own admission) who used to be a carpenter and now is retired and runs a blacksmith museum in Westhampton...who wants to go check it out with me?

Also, this morning was the first time I had to fill out a medical form and check the cancer box. It was weird, I saw the box and my pen hovered over it for a minute...I was briefly unsure of whether or not to check it.

I thought, I'm young, people like me don't get cancer, I have never been an unhealthy person. But I did have cancer and a hysterectomy and sometimes, although I spent months recovering and am still not 100%, the whole ordeal seems unreal to me. In my mind sometimes it is as though I had something bad, something like cancer, but not cancer, because people like me, no I, I don't get cancer. But I did so I checked the box and felt like someone else sitting in that dentist office for a few minutes. I wasn't sad, just a bit alienated from my body and the identity I claimed I had of my self for the better part of three decades.

I am now someone who had cancer...I never think about it because I am confident I'm cured (although the Cancer society jerks will never call it that, I'll only always be in remission). Even as I type this, it's like I'm writing a story about someone I made up for a poem. But I'm pretty sure there was at least part of me in that office this morning, and that part of me used to have cancer, this really bad and well-known disease that I hear people unlike me talk about on t.v.

Like I said, this is not something that made me unhappy or scared, it was just a realization I didn't know I hadn't made until this morning. Or a realization I didn't know existed for me until this morning. It's strange to discover you aren't who you think you are, that this new label applies to you that you were so culturally familiar with but so personally foreign to...which is kinda like cancer anyway: cells thought of as foreign troublemakerers that are actually cells of your own body turning on you. And how weird is it that I began writing in the second person here? As though I still, after the diagnosis and the surgery and the recovery and the box-checking, don't believe it.