Why I Update Every Day I Get To: Living with Metastatic Cancer

What happens when a terminal diagnosis collides with the desire to be more than a patient? Public health practitioner and Grand Exit podcaster Tamatha Thomas-Haase explores how living with metastatic cancer requires holding two truths at once: sorrow and joy, life and death, fear and expansion.

I remember arriving for my first day of chemotherapy. I was in line to check in on the ninth floor, surrounded by bald women, women in wigs, women in wheelchairs, women who had fallen asleep in their chairs, women who looked so weak and ill.

I turned to my husband and said, “I’m not supposed to be here.”

I turned to my husband and said, “I’m not supposed to be here.” And ran.

Two flights down the stairs to the lobby, my husband caught up to me (I wasn’t running as fast as I imagined) and just held me, gently guiding me back up to where, indeed, I was supposed to be.

When you are first diagnosed with breast cancer, the “hope police,” the “cancer warriors” and the “cheerleaders” arrive fast and furious, as do their projected expectations that your experience of, and reactions to, cancer will mirror theirs, or their neighbor’s or their sister-in-law’s.

Just this week, while shopping with my mother, a woman came up to tell me that her head used to look like mine and here she is: “Fifteen years cancer-free! Keep fighting! You’ll get through this!”

Do I tell her that I’m metastatic? That “getting through it” isn’t an option for me? That I’m not fighting cancer, the drugs are? That I try hard to love the hell out of this body, that it is not my enemy?

No, not today.

Today, I’m here to love on my aging mother and buy new shoes.

Throughout my cancer journey, shitstorm, circus rodeo, fill-in-the-blank, my identity has felt challenged by the limited view of living the cancer community allows for, and thus, the limited view of dying.

I am a whole person, not just a cancer patient, with a whole life (which includes my inevitable death), experiencing the whole range of human emotions, even more so now than ever before.

I need to show up honestly to this disease if I have any chance at leaving behind a legacy that honors me.

I’m the one who turns and runs and the one who puts every crystal she owns in her pockets and walks with a smile into the next round of brain scans.

I’m the one who wants desperately to talk about how sad I am about the future I won’t get and the one who wants to ring that damn “for survivors only” bell every time I walk by it, simply because today is a warm summer day and I saw a hummingbird.

During this time between, between treatments, between scans, between living and dying and living on, I am choosing to sit with the whole damn everything of it: my choices (the good and the bad), my stories (those reflected in the ways others see me and the ways I see myself, told and untold), my ways of living and how I may choose to die.

And I am granting myself constant permission to revisit and revise as needed, and as time allows.

The other day, my daughter’s friend introduced me as “a podcaster.”

A corner of my mouth turned upward in a smirk as I came face-to-face with the ongoing expansion of what I am known for.

How can it be that as my life span is decreasing, my story is expanding?

I’ll tell you how.

Even with this disease, even with trauma, we are dynamic, changing all the time. Hence my need to be only in conversations that are deep, intentional and reflect exactly who I am at that moment.

It’s why Grand Exit, a podcast I co-host with my dear friend Chelsea Leader Gold, brings me so much life. And I think and hope (gulp, that complicated word) it inspires others to leave feeling more alive.

It is an open invitation to zoom in on the messy, beautiful, ever-changing ways I choose to be living, think about dying and plan to be living on, and then to zoom out and realize what we, all who get to be alive now, share.

So here I sit.

With a terminal disease and, I promise you, fully alive.

And just like my husband told me in that stairwell in 2018, I am indeed exactly where I am supposed to be.

And so are you.