The healthcare system makes my head spin sometimes.
Here I was – 35 years old and 38 weeks pregnant in January of 2022. Waiting to see my oncologist at MSK for my yearly cancer check-up (because PSA: your friends with cancer are never ‘done with cancer’). As I sat in the waiting room with Ian by my side and our first baby in my belly, something strange came over me – a sense of two completely different parts of my identity colliding…no, wrestling…with each other.
I realized that in THIS waiting room, I was seen by my healthcare team (and most of the older women around me) as “too young” to have cancer. I’m considered AYA (diagnosed under age 40) in the cancer community.
But the next day, when I walked through the waiting room doors of my OB’s office, I was seen by THAT healthcare team as “geriatric”. Implying that I’m “past my prime” or “too old” when it comes to childbearing (even though I know that’s not the case and my OB hates this language as much as I do).
I didn’t really know how I felt about this sudden realization. To be honest, I still don’t know now, even years later (other than knowing for certain that language/classification is just one of the many ways we can and should improve healthcare).
But I do know that this is all just another thread of survivorhood – and now, apparently, motherhood – that is deeply woven into my identity now. This idea that sometimes, I’ll fit neatly into one box. Sometimes maybe two or three. And other times, I’ll live somewhere in the gray like I am right now.
When people asked me if I was ready for baby yet, I found myself responding with “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be knowing I’ll never be as ready as I want to be.” I genuinely felt that way, too. I had no idea what was ahead of me as I prepared to bring my first child into the world but I knew Ian and I were going to figure it out. And for the most part, three years in, I’d say we’re doing okay so far.
So, I wonder if that day’s waiting room epiphany wasn’t so much a collision of two identities, as it was a subtle but not so subtle lesson that my motherhood self decided to send to my survivorhood self. To move over & make room for her – that there are many ways in which I’m going to show up and walk through this world now and it’s okay to make space for all of it.
