hopeless façade (rant)

I suppose I should be happy I don't look sick.

But I think sometimes, if I did look sick, then maybe I could catch a break?

I feel lousy. I have a cold, my neck is killing me, my biopsy sites are painful. But I still did all the usual running around today, did homework with the kids, made dinner, and got the kids upstairs at bedtime. DH had disappeared before bath time, did the baths, and then got sucked into the vortex that is the upstairs TiVO: apparently, there was a football game on tonight.

I was ticked when I went upstairs to do prayers that the humidifiers hadn't been filled yet. So we did prayers and then I got on that, while DH went back (momentarily) to his football game...

Got the kids into bed and then took my shower: "If you hear screams, it's just me taking off my bandages."
DH: Oh. Yeah.

He forgot.

They all forget... they forget I had surgery. They forget I HAVE CANCER. They even don't give a flip that I have a miserable cold, even when they see and hear the evidence (multiple nose-blowings per hour). Of course they forget about the biopsies, since they can't even see the bandages! How are they supposed to remember that I went under the knife, again, just yesterday? (Words cannot describe how much I hate, hate, hate being cut.)

I keep up this façade that I'm OK, so of course they believe it. They want to believe it. I want to believe it, too. The downside, of course, is that I'm not OK, and it's apparently never OK for me to be not-OK. It's not fair to them that I'm not OK, right? Can't expect them to pick up the slack or treat me any differently, right? obviously not with the kids, they are such pee-wees, they are more or less clueless...

Still. What would it take for DH -- I love him dearly, but sometimes his cluelessness hurts -- to ask, "How are you doing today?" I know, he relies on me to tell him if there is something he needs to know. I suppose I should tell him, he needs to ask me how I'm doing every so often, just so I know that he hasn't forgotten, you know, that I HAVE CANCER, and I frequently feel lousy as a result.

Ahhh -- I know what this is. Tomorrow morning is the whole body scan, we'll get to see the distant metastases. I'm sure they're there. Hope I'm wrong -- you'll be able to knock me over with a feather if I am, though. That would be a happy surprise! Hee. No, seriously: I ~know~ (feel?) that the news is going to be not-good, and this is me, freaking out, very quietly.

Time for bed. More tomorrow, I'm sure -- there will be news.

Addendum: tonight's web-crawl research topic: breast cancer risk is greatly increased (+42%) for pre-menopausal white women with thyroid cancer treated with RAI. Couldn't find anything on increased risk of melanoma, though, although apparently melanoma and differentiated thyCa are related, both being cancers of epitheliel cells. It will be at least a week before I hear from Dr. T's office the results of the biopsies, anyway. Best not to think about it.

No wonder my head wants to explode.