You sit back in the infusion chair again. It’s your third year. The fourth protocol. You can’t even count the times you’ve heard, “Just a little longer,” “Just a few more months,” or “Let’s try one more thing.” What started as a short-term plan has become your life.
I know this kind of fatigue. Not the fatigue of one round of chemo or a hard surgery. This is deeper. It’s the fatigue of living in a constant state of treatment, where the finish line keeps moving farther away.
Somewhere along the way, your view of hope shifts. It isn’t gone, but it changes. It gets worn down. You start to wonder if you’ll ever feel normal again, or if “normal” belongs to your past.
As treatment drags on, emotions get harder to manage. Some days you can pull up real optimism. You tell yourself the next scan will look better. The next change will work. Other days, the weight of it all feels crushing. Your body is tired, and your mind is tired too. You might snap at people who don’t deserve it. You might pull away from things that once gave you joy. Planning can feel pointless when you may have to cancel for yet another appointment, another side effect, or another setback.
Long treatment also changes how you think. Decisions get heavy. Should you take a trip? Say yes to the invitation? Make any plan that reaches past next week? You can feel stuck in limbo, caught between living and waiting. You are not dying, but you are not fully living either. Every choice comes with a quiet condition: unless treatment gets in the way.
Your mood shifts too, even when you try to keep things steady. Friends may say you seem quieter. Less patient. More guarded. They’re not wrong. When there’s no clear end, you start to protect yourself. You hold back excitement when good news comes, because good news can vanish fast. You stop trusting timelines, because the timelines keep breaking.
And your caregiver is carrying their own kind of pain.
They watch you struggle and can’t fix it. They track meds, manage calendars, and return the same calls, over and over. They try to stay hopeful, but they’re tired from holding it together. Treatment that drains your body can drain their life too. Work suffers. Friendships thin out. Sleep gets short. Health slips. Love becomes a full-time job.
Long treatment can also change intimacy. They’ve seen you at your weakest, vomiting, shaking, too weak to stand, needing help with things you never thought you’d need help with. It isn’t about emotions in those moments. It’s about the body. Both of you may miss the relationship you had before cancer became a daily presence. Sometimes you catch a look on their face that you can’t quite name. Grief, fear, fatigue, or all three at once.
What often goes unspoken is this: prolonged treatment forces bigger questions.
Are we doing the right thing? Not only, “Is the number improving?” but, “Is my life worth what this is costing me?” When does aggressive care start to focus more on extending life than creating life? How do you weigh more time against better time?
There are no easy answers here. A scan can’t settle these questions. A lab result can’t tell you what you should value. These are personal questions. They ask you to re-define what success means, even if you never wanted to.
Maybe success no longer means remission. Maybe it means stability. Maybe it means slowing the cancer down. Maybe it means more good days than bad. The details will depend on a lot, your cancer type, how your body reacts, your age, other health issues, your values, your support, your finances, and how much uncertainty you can live with.
It’s okay if your definition changes. It’s okay to be angry that this is your life. It’s okay to grieve the future you pictured, while still fighting for the life you have.
If you’re stuck in a cycle that seems to have no end, know this: your fatigue makes sense. Your frustration makes sense. Those moments when you feel desperate do not mean you’ve lost hope. They mean you’re human, and this is stretching you to your edge.
You don’t have to be grateful every day. You don’t have to find a silver lining. You don’t have to inspire anyone. You only have to keep going, one appointment at a time, one day at a time, one breath at a time.
That is enough. You are enough.
