In the fifteen minutes that it took me to drive to work this
morning, judging by the scenery flying by my window at seventy miles an hour, I
could have been driving for hours.
When I pulled out of our little neighborhood, I had a
spectacular view of the Appalachian Mountains looming dark in their shroud of
early morning fog, not yet tinged by the hint of dawn. The moon was just above
the ridge, so large that it looked like a paper cut-out pasted onto a child’s
drawing. I’ve read that there is some sort of atmospheric phenomenon at play
that makes the moon appear so much larger, but I was able to turn off my
sometimes over-analytic mind and just enjoy it.
I hit the patches of fog as I pulled onto the bypass and
drove through small patches of dense fog interspersed by increasingly bright
patches of early morning light. By the time that I crossed from the bypass to
the interstate, now heading directly East, I could see the brilliant red of a
beautiful sunrise over the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The patches of fog were less frequent, the sky brighter as I
drove on and, by the time that I pulled into the parking lot at work, the sky
was light blue and the sun was shining.
The only thing that could have made the drive to work more
beautiful this morning was for it to have happened after the brown grass turned
green again and the trees were more than bare limbs scratching the sky. As much
as I complain about the conservative people in the Valley, it’s hard to beat
its natural beauty.
Thinking about the changes in such a short distance on my
way to work made me think about the distance that I’ve traveled over the past
ten years. It was ten years ago today – just about this time of morning – that I
was in the hospital after months of back pain now with a new fever and unexplained
rash that the doctor came into my room to tell me that I had Lymphoma. It was
the start of almost six weeks of diagnostic tests – a CT-guided fine needle
aspirate of a lymph node in my back, ultrasounds of various parts of my body, a
bone marrow aspirate, CT and PET imaging, a mediastinoscopy where they inserted
a scope through the front of my neck to harvest a lymph node behind my sternum
– before I started chemo.
After all of those diagnostic tests, I got the “good” news
that I had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and it really was good news. The five year survival rate for some of the non-Hodgkin’s
Lymphomas were listed as less than five percent at that time. After feeling unwell for more
than six months followed by weeks of diagnostic tests, not even the start of
chemo went smoothly. I sat in the
oncologist’s office while the nurse looked at my arms and told me that my veins
weren’t good enough for chemo, so it was back to the operating room where they
inserted a port-a-cath under the skin in my chest. Thin tubing snaked under my skin toward my
neck where it entered one of the large veins.
Back in the oncologist’s office, my port-a-cath ready for
use, I sat in one of a dozen recliners arranged in a circle, about half
occupied, at 41 I was the youngest person there by several decades. My husband
drove me to my first chemo appointment because I was on such heavy-duty
narcotics and he stayed until the nurse got me settled. I sent him off to work, but before he left,
he leaned over the recliner and kissed me so achingly tenderly that it brought
tears to my eyes. What he said next, though, sent me over the edge into
tears. “If there was any way that I
could trade places with you, I would.” I still cannot tell that story to anyone
without crying.
After he left, the nurse reviewed the possible side-effects
– hair loss, loss of fertility, heart problems and leukemia 10 – 15 years down
the road, and allergic reaction are all that I remember out of the pages of
side-effects that I had read the previous week and signed off on. Then it was time
to start. My first chemo treatment. It all felt so unreal. Even though I felt
like utter shit and knew that I was sick, I couldn’t have cancer, it couldn’t
be me.
The first bag that they hung wasn’t even chemo, it was
Benadryl to stave off possible allergic reaction. If any of you have taken
over-the-counter Benadryl, you know how sleepy it can make you. I found that IV
Benadryl makes you even sleepier. It turns out that I slept through the next
three or four hours as a total of four different drugs flowed into my veins.
All that fluid forced into my body had one immediate effect. I woke up and took an immediate trip to the
bathroom, pulling my IV along behind me. First few drops and I was suddenly
wide awake. Why was I peeing red? I
relaxed a bit when I finally remembered that was one of the side-effects since
one of the drugs itself was red.
With memories of Campbell Scott in the movie Dying Young
stuck in my head, I expected to throw up for the rest of the day. Turns out the
after-effects of my first chemo were minimal. The anti-nausea meds that they
gave me worked wonders, and although food didn’t taste the same and I lived
mostly on fruit and bread – because they actually tasted like they were
supposed to - for the next six months I was never actually sick.
Six months of chemo followed by six weeks of radiation and
my CT was clear. I felt so terrible through chemo that I had decided that I
would end chemo there if my CT wasn’t clear. I was lucky not to have to see if
I would have changed my mind facing the reality instead of only the possibility
of chemo not working.
I started this post musing about the many changes that
happened in the fifteen mile trip to work this morning. The changes that I’ve experienced since my
Hodgkin’s diagnosis are…. I debated about typing “many”, typing “few”, typing
any of a number of words that crossed my mind, but none come close to
expressing what is different about me.
In some ways, I’m more compassionate. I understand constant, unrelenting physical
pain. I understand narcotic addiction and the shame that goes with it (after 8
months of prescription narcotics, it wasn’t easy to stop and I was too
embarrassed to tell my physician. Careful rationing of my last prescription,
tapering off, then a few days of feeling like I was climbing out of my own
skin, and it was over. I should have talked to the doc, though), survivors
guilt (why did four friends’ family members succumb to their cancer in the few
months after I was diagnosed and why did I survive?)
In other ways, it has made me more impatient – and I was
never very patient to begin with! I don’t want to waste my time waiting in the
car, waiting in line, waiting for someone else to do…anything. It’s made me
realize that retirement may never come and that I need to do what I always put
off until retirement NOW. I don’t want to spend my time visiting and humoring
intolerant family members when I could be writing, quilting, gardening,
building furniture or any of the seeming millions of other crafts and arts that
I want to try.
Now, at ten years out, I can be considered cured of my
Hodgkin’s according to my oncologist. I still have to face the possibility of
heart damage and/or leukemia due to the drugs that I took and other cancers due
to the radiation that I received. I also have a greater need of naps than I
used to, but that could be due to the fact that I’m in my fifties now and not
the eighteen year-old that I still feel like on some days.
I deal with things slowly. My husband doesn’t always
understand that I can’t figure out what I’m feeling immediately, but it takes
me time to process. After I finish the
book that I’m writing now, I’m thinking of incorporating my cancer diagnosis
and treatment into a book – of course it has to have a HEA ending. I think I’m finally ready.
