Irresolutions: Battling Metaphors

Post Author: Jo Schonewolf

The first thing my partner’s father asked after we told him I had cancer was, “Is Jo going to fight this?” It was a serious, intense question, one that we hadn’t even begun to think about. It was less than a week after the colonoscopy that showed a five centimeter mass at the top of my descending colon near my splenic flexure. It was less than a day after I received the biopsy results that showed that the mass was adenocarcinoma, moderately differentiated. For twenty-four hours, I had been focused on telling everyone that after months of symptoms with no clear cause, the answer was colon cancer. Fighting hadn’t crossed my mind. 

My partner looked at me sideways before he answered his dad, waiting for my nod. I shrugged. “Yeah, she’s going to fight this,” he said into the phone. “Good,” his dad said, and led the conversation to questions about treatment and staging, what resources we had available, who we should talk to, what the timeline was. This was before the chest CT, the consult with surgical oncology, the dizzying flurry of information and instructions. This was still a month away from the six-hour surgery that would leave me with many incisions and arms that still don’t bend quite like they did before. We didn’t know anything about what the “fight” would look like, but we signed up for it all the same. 

Honestly, even now, now that we know they successfully removed all the cancer in my colon during surgery, now that the pathology on the lymph nodes showed no cancer, now that there’s no chemo, I’m still not sure what my “battle with cancer” looks like. I know the size and shape of my recovery from surgery (low-fiber diet, no lifting anything over 10 pounds, no high-impact activity, no scratching at the incisions as they heal, no matter how many chicken pox flashbacks they cause). I know the monitoring that lies ahead (regular blood work, CT scans, and colonoscopies). But I don’t know what the status of the war is. Did I win my fight with cancer already, or have the cancer cells fallen back to regroup? Do I need to build up stronger defenses, or has the enemy been obliterated? Did I kick cancer’s ass, or is this a momentary defeat of the mutated cells who are even now multiplying in some other hidden corner of my body, plotting their revenge? 

My cancer defies resolution, at least at this stage. No matter how hard I “fight,” there’s no guarantee that I’ll remain cancer-free in 2023 (or ‘24, or ‘25, for that matter). Recurrence is a real possibility, which is why we’re monitoring me so closely. Everyone thanked my lucky stars that I had a skilled surgical team, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the post-surgery pathology came back clean, and I hope (I pray) that everyone else has moved on from their worry over my health. 

But the book isn’t fully closed for me. My gut is still going to clench at every test result email notification. I’m still going to bite my lip with every fluctuation on the scale. I’ll still be adding entries to my running list of irregular stools, for the next five years, anyway. All of this is fine, I guess. It’s normal, or normal for cancer. But, truth be told, I can’t fight for the next five years. I can’t be at war for that long. I can’t exhaust my energy struggling against myself. 

I need a new metaphor. 

I need a new story, one that twists and bends with each new medical update but never snaps in shame or shatters in defeat. 

The pastor in me keeps trying to compare it to parts of the Christian year. There is so much waiting and expectation that I’d say it was Advent, but if it is, it was a long and horrible one: I do have a C-section scar, but the only thing I gave birth to was a dying, diseased colon, and the only epiphany I have are my nerves screaming as they wake after reconnection is completed. God is with us, fully divine and fully human, but all my surgery produced is absence. 

Maybe Lent is the better fit, another season of preparation. It was a whirlwind month waiting for surgery, and I did do a fast of a kind, mostly broth and bread, as that was the only meal guaranteed to get past the tumor. I had a last supper of colon prep and antibiotics. I was left alone before many who asked me to tell them who I was and why I was here. In the end, I was led away by people I didn’t know for my ordeal. The surgery team spread my arms out wide for six hours in order to get to the tumor and I’m left wondering whether Jesus’ shoulders bore this same ache I do alongside the wounds in his hands and side. Maybe this healing is one long Holy Saturday. Maybe my Easter is remission. 

But still, that feels too tidy. I can’t really sing out, “Fought the fight, the battle won.” There is still sin after salvation, and what I’m really waiting on is Pentecost. I’m waiting on the Spirit to rush around me, to make plain the languages of blood panels and CT scans and pathology reports. I’m longing for the Spirit, who I trust knows me inside and out, to come and be my comforter and my advocate, to teach me how to know and love this body I’m in, to be as attuned to its pains and needs as scripture says God is. I’m listening for the whisper of the Spirit, speaking the wisdom of my cells into my hearing. 

This is the long work of Ordinary Time, the weeks and weeks after Pentecost: learning to love this body that betrayed me, practicing trust, understanding the ways that I have failed it, and through repentance and repair, building a new relationship together. I need the love of God to be shed abroad not just in my heart but in my lymph nodes, liver, and lungs too, across all my poor, battered mortal coil. 

It’s not an ideal New Year’s resolution. It’s far from a SMART goal. But this is the work that stretches out in front of me, with all of its indeterminacies and unknowns: I have to love myself. I have to lay down my arms and practice awareness. I have to learn how to hear what my body tells me, and to trust it, and to advocate for it. And when I can’t love my body, I can practice caring for it anyway. Regardless of the cancer, regardless of the pain, regardless of the frustration and confusion and open questions, my body deserves care. 

And that’s at least a place to start.