My Journey

 This has always been a blog meant for family-- a way for Dirks' and Burrell's to know their grandkids growing up states away, but also for my own posterity to look back and know that they were loved and cherished beyond words.  I also allow myself the occasional daydream that my grandkids will see a story about their parents and that it begins a fun tradition or inside joke that brings joy and laughter and endearing love.

Between the years of 2014-2017, this blog became Caden's Cancer Care Central.  Not only was it meant to relay messages that were too difficult to speak aloud, but it also became a therapy for me.  I still cannot read what was written during those years.  Because it was so raw then, I'm wounded and fragile now.

In September, I read a Facebook post that changed my life.  Not only did it break my heart, but it broke the reality of the girl I have always been, leaving me beaten and desperately scared.

In 2014, when speaking of Caden's diagnosis, the resident doctor explained it like this: "Undifferentiated-- cells of an unknown origin.  Embryonal-- cells in their infancy.  Sarcoma-- solid tumor.  Of The Liver-- cells began growing in the liver.  They could have "landed" in any part of the body."  

September 5, 2023, it was written by another mother on the UESL cancer page that her surgeon had explained it like this, what I now know to be the correct explanation: "During the embryonal stage in-utero, the liver cells did not become actual liver cells (Undifferentiated)."  Caden was born with dormant cancer in his liver, most likely activated by a viral infection.

I knew then and I know now that there was nothing I could have done differently while pregnant, nothing we could have done differently during the years of great sorrow, but I do know this-- It felt, in that moment, as if Caden was diagnosed all over again.  Time slowed down.  I felt as if I was in a dream.  My heart rate skyrocketed, I felt like I was choking, and I broke.

I thought the next few weeks would be the typical "September leading up to October 4th."  I usually struggle more than normal during this time frame, always feeling a bit of a reset on October 5th, a gratitude that I survived another year.  But things kept getting harder and harder, my body feeling more and more alien.  As the weeks passed, I felt increasingly like I was living a nightmare, that I was trapped in an alien body, living someone else's life, that I was truly going certifiably crazy.  I was waking each morning in full-blown panic, having hours upon hours of anxiety, all without logic, thought, or prompting events.  I could no longer handle any sort of stress, breaking down if anything was "sprung" on me.  The thought of going to the grocery store was too much.  I could no longer get myself to do things that I normally love.  It even came to the point where my kids coming home from school was pure dread-- I had nothing left to give, I was failing as their mother, the only "job" I ever wanted in life.  Where I once could fake, I now could not.  Nothing felt right in my body or life.  My every waking minute was a deep, dark, scary hell.  

 Over the next few months, as often as I can force myself to sit down at the computer that once was a lifeline but now feels like torture and fear and remembered heartache (hence the YEARS of silence, because it was just so, so hard), I plan to use this blog as therapy once again.  I hope that I can release the all-consuming grief and reset my mind so that this can once again become a blog for my family.  There is so much that has happened during the years without written words, and there will continue to be beautiful experiences that I hope to add to our present and future, but for a time, it's going to be about me.  Perhaps this will touch the lives of my family in just as beautiful a way as candid pictures and good and bad, real-life, everyday magical mundane.  Because, if there is one thing I have learned since that fateful day in September, it's this: I wouldn't change a single thing that has led me to this point.  I know what I did and why I did certain things that brought me to this break.  I'd happily and willingly sacrifice all that I have, all that I am, for them.  Always. 

I thought I knew what PTSD meant, and was.  I didn't.  I do now.  While my PTSD isn't as severe as Multiple Personality, it is similar in some ways.  My body and mind are "broken."  My body reacts either to remembered events or simply because it feels the world is a constant barrage of life-threatening events, without any thought, emotion, or logic.  I cannot reason with my mind or body anymore, to, in essence, assure myself that I am safe.  My "job" now is to bring them back together as one.

I was diagnosed with PTSD, with "side effects" of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder.  My panic and anxiety are present because I have PTSD.  I now have an unknown amount of healing time (it could take years, they say, which scares me to death) where I work to calm my body down, to convince my mind and body that all is well, all is safe, that we are ok, and that nothing is lying in wait to take another child from me.  

I have other diagnosable PTSD characteristics, but Trauma Reactions are my main response, the biggest reason I felt I was going crazy, and the most pressing issue that drove me to check myself into a 6-week, partial-hospitalization program over Christmas and New Year's.  I entered practically screaming in rage and fear, "This is not me.  This is not my body.  This is not my life.  I need skills to bring back Capable Stephanie because this Stephanie is a failure that is ruining all I have ever been, known, and wanted.  I'm going to call this time of my life Part-Time Stephanie Dirks!"

I may feel helpless at times-- it is so big, so deep, and scary, with an unknown amount of healing time-- but I do not feel hopeless.  Because I know that He who carried me, my son, and my family, then, is carrying me now.  

"I am not broken, I am healing."  

Come with me as I share with you how I learned to believe that statement for myself.  This is me.  The weakness I feel now is proof of my strength.  I still believe I'm the luckiest girl in the world.