Chemo Sucks. Who Knew?

Well, I am sorry to have to report this to you, but it turns out that Chemotherapy sucks.

Why, oh  why am I always surprised at how hideous medicine for cancer is?  I can't remember for one minute how perfectly awful every single treatment turns out to be, and always show up dressed for a cruise and packing an eyebrow pencil.  But they are all monstrous, clearly designed in a Transylvanian laboratory by some scientist with crazy eyes who has been kicked out of every legitimate institution and is assisted only by an abhorrent little pervert who calls him master. Chemo especially. Don't tell me that hideous drip came from any normal person.  How did I not think that this was going to be terrible? I know that someday in the future, they are going to look back on Angelie Jolie cutting off her own breasts with the same horror with which we view Aztecs throwing virgins off of pyramids. When faced with chemotherapy, the people of the future are going to be all
"They did what?"

I am frequently accused of heroism and bravery, as though some baby was going to be rescued from a burning building if I say Yes! to this surgery or that chemo treatment. The fact is, I probably would take a chemo treatment to save a baby from a fire, but up to this point, well, nobody has asked me if I'd like to choose.

   I'm sure I would save the baby. Pretty sure. But the point is, I'm not brave. Just obedient. And I have the long term memory of a gnat. I keep forgetting that my obedience is going to result in feeling bad in ways that I have never imagined. Not that there's a lot of choice.

 I mean, I guess that all these Doctors kind of give me a option. Do the treatment or die are usually the selections. But I approach these various forms of torture with such a positive attitude! When I know it's going to suck!I learn nothing from previous experience. I keep telling myself things like "Anybody can do anything  four times" or "How bad can it be?" Oh brother.  I keep forgetting!

 Did I learn nothing from that surgery, where I thought I was going to be given some good drugs for a couple of days wearing my cute pajamas and then go home? Did I learn nothing, when they bolted my head to a conveyer belt, worse than the scariest movie ever made? And then microwaved me on high for twenty minutes? Did I forget about the feeding tube in my nose and that I wasn't allowed to have so much as a sip of water for weeks? I learned nothing. And now this.

  I had a little chemo lite during radiation, back when I was going to the opulent private operation run by Dr. Carlos, or Dr. McSueño, as we call him around here. It's a bit different at the National Health system, I don't mind telling you. At Dr.McSueño's they had individual booths outfitted with the most comfortable loungers I have ever draped myself over, and equally comfortable chairs and tables for visitors in case you wanted to offer cocktails, along with individual flat screen tv's.

 My new set up is very different indeed. The room is tiny, and they fit two chairs in there. In order to make it work,  the chairs face each other, and you sit sort of knee to knee with your cube mate. The nurse has to edge in sideways every time the IV alarm goes off--which it did about a dozen times, and  which always turned out to be me, forgetting to keep the hand receiving the IV motionless. Trying to use my eyebrow pencil.

My roommates rotated during my session, which was kind of fun. The first was a skate park type with a spray of hair that rose into a magnificent curl over the shaved sides of his head. He left half way through my session and was immediately replaced with an old cowboy, skin like hide and a fine old hat and wranglers. Neither roommate was disposed to conversation

    I was fooled for about eight hours after the actual chemo session that for once treatment was not going to be a grisly nightmare.I even bragged to my friends that they had fed me so well on homemade bone broth that I was going to sail through it. I was wrong. I started getting sick that evening and stayed sick until the middle of the next afternoon. I was raised too delicately to talk about what I mean by sick in this case, but it wasn't pleasant.

The worst, though, is that it has messed with me emotionally, and has been relentless in the battering of my mood. I got over the physical, flu like symptoms in less than a day, and I felt I might be safe. For a minute. But there's something about being back in treatment that makes it hard to forget what's been happening to me.

 This is the fourth day since I shared chemo time with that old cowboy, and I feel dejected, and insecure, even though everything is good and I'm getting ready to go see my family. I feel afraid, and my stupid doctor told me I have to wear a mask on the plane, so I'm going to be that person, and instead of picking out an awesome capsule wardrobe which  can make twenty five outfits out of five pieces, I'm trying to figure out if I've got all my medications.

Don't tell me to keep my chin up! Oh, yes, I know you were going to. I know you were going to tell me to be grateful and remember how lucky I am, to count my blessings and think of the good things. I am doing those things, I really am, and I have moments when I remember that I can eat and drink like a normal human being without wearing a maxi pad tied around my neck, so wearing a mask is not that big a deal. Sometimes I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

But not when I'm picking out turbans to wear because I'm going to go bald.


 

Chemo Frenia

I am someone who bursts into tears.
 
    As you know, if you've read the blurb my uncle unknowingly supplied for the header of this blog.I don't have a lot of formal education.  The lure of lime colored chiffon and feathers dyed to match that was offered by ballroom dance schools was more than I could resist when I discovered it in my late teens. I had already exhausted my ability to be a hippy, which turned out to be a suprisingly similar thing  to being poor and trashy, only with poor, trashy musicians. That was the first thing I tried after leaving high school, at much too early an age. Then came the lime chiffon.
 
        Regardless, I do know that one wants to avoid cliches like "burst into tears."  ( and one wants to describe oneself as "one," so refined! ) But I can't help it. No other phrase will do. Daily I burst, and thankfully it's into tears, at the tiniest provocation.
 
        One minute, I'm minding my own business and wondering if I have to wash pre-washed spinach, the next I'm spraying saltwater over who ever has poked me in the emotions, which are right up there at the top, easily reached.
   For instance, yesterday, I bumped into Don W. I was at SuperLakes, the local equivalent of Wegmans. Sort of. I was having the same washing discussion with myself over Kale...nothing but cancer fighting superfoods in my grocery cart...when I bumped into him.

        Don was one of many who sneakily participated in an underground fundraiser for me. It wasn't the sort of thing where there's a bake sale and the chance to throw darts at balloons or guess a person's weight.
 
       Pause. I'm just thinking what an  unholy disaster a weight guessing concession would be around here. Wow. Okay, unpause.

          Somehow a number of friends got organized by my friend Jan into slipping a little cash here and a little cash there into envelopes and making sure that it got into my hands, disguised as a a "Get Well" card.  Yesterday, I was trying to thank Don for his participation in this effort, and ended up wiping my nose on his shirt. It's awful. I can't get through a conversation without crying.
 My sister and mother are particular minefields. Zero chance of getting out of a text or email exchange without me bawling. But you know what? It's only things that make me see how wonderful people really are, or how great my life actually is, that has this power over me.
 
       I seldom cry over what people would consider bad news. Well, cancer is bad news, let's face it. But I didn't cry when I was first told I had cancer. Or any of the times since, which seems like about a thousand. I  cried with Bruno when we first considered the reality of being separated by how the world is made. That got a pretty good Celtic style keening out of both of us, but not so much since.

  Oh, I feel it. I react. I react as though Thor the Thunder God just swung his hammer of doom into my solar plexus. It just doesn't make me cry. Things I love make me cry.
   
      So,  I didn't cry when they told me I was having chemo after all. Yep, you read that right. We went to see my doctor on Thursday, and he wrote an order for chemo as though the last time we'd seen each the topic of chemotherapy had never even come up, never mind that we had high fived over not getting it.
 
      And of course, I had promised in a group email, to all my friends, that I would never, ever, make Marti of the fluent Spanish go to IMSS with me again.  So there I was, unable, with my faltering Spanish, to ask questions of  the doctor who had just told me to order up a wig, sister, looks like your hair's going to be falling out after all.

         In a later conversation, Bruno talked about how they had moved the football again, but I didn't feel that way. I'm not excited about getting chemo, because I'm not an idiot. But I know that this was the original plan. It seems, therefore, that there must have been some kind of communication between my surgeon and my oncologist, at IMSS. There aren't any new tests, there's no change in my status (cancer FREE), so I think we've just gotten on to the original treatment track, and I find that reassuring.

Still not excited about chemo, though.
 
    Naturally, I had just made an appointment for an expensive cut and highlights because I wanted to be looking good when I go back to visit my family.Hair genius Jim Coolidge at Gloriosa ( oh, come on, a little link is the least I can do) isn't the kind to hold you to an appointment,though. And, of course, he has no desire to see his work coming out in handfuls. We'll work it out. I've seen all those movies where  the heroine goes crazy and starts hacking off her trademark hair with a Swiss Army knife and it comes out looking adorable, so Jim can certainly pull that off. What could go wrong?  

The short curly (!) hair is what's growing in since my
last dance with chemo. That whole area just went...
bald. Which I didn't know until I wore my hair in a fabulous updo to
a party and caught sight of myself in a corner mirror.

   
      My doctors somehow managed to intuit, perhaps as a result of me bursting into tears, that an upcoming trip I have planned is very, very important to me. I want to see my sister and my brother. I want to see the rest of my family, and they will all be gathered in the same spot so that I can. I want to see my children, who aren't technically mine, but I think they are. Don't tell anyone, that's the kind of thing that gets you into the Lifetime movie rotation.
     
 I want to see my Mommy. Whoops! Bursting into tears over here, kleenex, stat! Thinking about this sort of stuff is what gets me.
 
     If you can believe it, they have planned the chemo around my trip so I can still go. I can still go! I have my first treatment on Tuesday and the rest when I get back. So probably just a few weird patches of my hair and maybe one of my eyebrows will fall out during the week I have to recover before I leave, but you know, it's family, they have to love me.

   Cancer is not exactly what I would call my friend. But I am growing used to the idea that I will live with it until a safe labeled Acme falls on my head.

      So I cry. I burst into tears. But about cancer? Fuck you, Cancer.
 

I'm Cured! Um, I guess.

So where's Elliott? Did I die? Back in the hospital? Some other ghastly medical disaster? Believe me, after experiencing that business with the hole in my neck, I've learned that we don't know what we don't know as far as how weird the body can get.

Waiting in Line.

    However, the answers are nope, nope, and nope. Where I have been is standing in line. Yes, I have literally been standing in line since May 27th, the date of my last post. Not the same line, sometimes we changed lines, and there have been moments when instead of standing in a line, I've been waiting in large rooms filled to overflowing with people who, like me, are waiting to find out which line to stand in next. It requires a certain Zen outlook to remain positive. But I am! I am positive!  Why wouldn't I be? At the end of one of those lines was a doctor who looked at his computer and said "No need for chemo. You are cancer free." Yahooo! Yipppee! Hot Dang! Right?

    No. I don't know why. Maybe I've got that weird Baron Munchausen disease, where you don't want to give up being sick. But I don't think so. My genius local therapist, Valerie Rhoda, writes

"The specter of cancer & the recurrences put a damper on any relief & joy because you don't, can't, really trust that it is gone. As you said you were prepared for chemo & odd as it sounds you now have to adjust to no chemo. Chemo represents actively fighting the disease, doing nothing is scary, it's passive"

 I was really, really happy. It's just that I'm no wide eyed cancer virgin. I've been cured of this shit before. Twice. And the doctors always say some variation of "You're cured. But don't go too far."

    It took a a couple of days to realize how strongly the assumption of chemo in my future had taken hold. The biggest tip off was during my next turn in the giant waiting room. I found myself scanning the room for women who had come up with interesting ways to tie their headscarves, and had to keep reminding myself that my hair wasn't going to fall out. Because I'm not having chemo.

  Yet.

  See what I mean? I just can't quite get free of this. And if you write me and tell me I have to think positive I'll write you back and it will not be pretty. If my future depends on the quality of my thoughts, after all of this, then I. Am. Doomed.

    No, I think I just "have my walls up" as they say on the Bachelor. ( Don't watch the Bachelor? I'm shocked. But every single one of the promiscuous ninnies that line up to be hosed by whichever fatuous himbo is this season's Bachelor announces that she has  her walls up as a result of a previous heartbreak.That's usually about one minute before she takes off her underwear.) Leave me alone, I've been stuck at home for a long time

    So that's what Bruno and I have been doing. But we sure didn't do it alone.
  My friend Marti, fluent in Spanish and willing for reasons unknown to do anything for anyone lucky enough to be her friend, has been with us and we could not have made this transition from private care to the National Healthcare System without her.  Leaving at 6:30 in the morning to arrive at the National Health Hospital in Guad in time to wait for four hours before spending twenty minutes with my surgeon, which is just long enough to receive a stack of authorizations written on post-its and scraps of file folder for appointments and tests to be scheduled at the same time in different places with a variety of specialty departments. ( We had to travel up and down stairs and back and forth across the building, making individual appointments at, respectively, plastic surgery, rehabilitation, Xray, imaging, and oh yeah, oncology.) Thanks to Marti and her Spanish and unflappable patience, and Bruno and his ....thereness, I have somehow managed to enter the Mexican Medical system and come out on the other side.

     I have wanted, often, to somehow address the village that I live in and their participation in my recovery. I don't know how to do it.  It is so much the stuff of the Disney movies of my youth, and so unlike the world I left behind when I moved here, that I just don't know how to describe the way that I have been held aloft for this entire time. Groups of people have coalesced into teams. Sometimes corralled into teams by friend who were born with the get 'r done gene.
      Teams and individuals have kept me upright and fed, have groomed my dogs, and given me free passes for counseling, who have provided homemade gruel for the feeding tube when that was still going up my nose, who have kept me on a steady diet of bone broth which I believe to be responsible for the successful healing of my surgery. Fresh aloe vera and honey, cases of Ensure from Costco, handmade cards. Friends who have kept our refrigerator stocked and made sure that Bruno never went without lasagna. Friends who snuck around and collected anonymous envelopes of cash like it was hush money so there would be a little something to help.  It's magic, and impossible to adequately describe. I would have to write a song, like Lulu in "To Sir with Love"

Got out yesterday to my first Dancefit class with James since
the surgery. Christine wrote this
 "

So looked who joined us for exercise this morning! She started at the back but by the end of the class she was on stage with James. So not surprising. Welcome back Elliott xxxxxx

   In minutes, there were so many comments and likes and words of support and encouragement, I felt like Kim Kardashian.

I want to be very clear about one thing. This isn't about people liking me, facebook thumbs or no. This is about the kind of people that live in this place and the the kind of place that it is. In other words, it's not me, it's you. 

 I wrote a story about community after my first Christmas in Mexico. As part of my project of getting all my stories under one roof, as it were, I've posted it here. It was a different community, but the magic is the same.