Broken Doll

…which, ironically, upsets me a bit because it has taken this long to get here. Twelve days. I have today and tomorrow to enjoy this before I go back to chemo and start all over again. And “enjoy” might be a bit of a stretch since I have so much shit to do, and increasingly fewer days in which I feel good enough to do them.

But I am incredibly grateful — I am pain-free. I remember a time just a few months ago when I worried that I would never again know what that felt like. And it feels good. And I’m so happy about that. There is only that weird static-like not-quite-painful sensation that comes on during the ten-to-twelve days after chemo. There are no words to describe that. It’s not exactly pain, not exactly nausea, and “discomfort” is just too vague. I can’t even think of anything to compare it to — it’s like nothing else I’ve experienced. How to get people to understand what that feels like… how much it cripples me in small, subtle ways? I can’t.

But every once in a while I do notice the lack of pain. You become so used to thinking of painlessness as the default that you forget that it feels like anything. You don’t notice. But I do.