One Year On

Do you know what day it is???

Me neither.  But it's somewhere around the beginning of March and my birthday is coming up which means that sometime, right around this time, one year ago, I was taking my kids to get their teeth cleaned when I got a call from my doctor to tell me that I had cancer.

My therapist reminds me that there is a reason that anniversaries are significant.  They hold weight, whether you want them to or not.  The past month has been one long "Cancer Anniversary" because I don't know (and don't really want to know) what day marks the scariest time of my life.  Was it the February day in Mexico when I found the lump?  Was it the day I went in for a mammogram?  Was it the day in March when I went in for a core biopsy and nearly fainted?  Or was it the day my doctor called me?

Two weeks ago, Michael and I took the kids to the Bahamas for their week-long winter break, the same winter-break we were on last year when I was lounging by a pool and casually brainstorming episodic sitcoms that I was going to write and finding lumps in my breast.  I was experiencing some version of post-traumatic stress for days leading up to this trip.  What was I going to feel?  How was I going to react?  Was I going to have involuntary fits of hysteria??  None of it came to pass, partly because of my recent aversion to drama and excitement, and partly because I left my purse in a Bahamian taxi.  Bear with me.

I realized I'd left it about fifteen minutes after checking in and the taxi van was not a van that belonged to the hotel.  It wasn't even a van that the hotel usually hires.  It was a driver that the company that the hotel hires out, hired out.  Michael told me to forget it, it was gone.  Try to enjoy the vacation.  But I couldn't forget it and I felt like I had to act quickly.  I sent him off with the kids to jump in the pool and start their vacation and then I enlisted the help of the woman who was working the bell hop desk and she tried to get people on the phone for me.  We waited on hold for eternities.  When someone was finally ready to talk to me, I couldn't understand a word they were saying.  (They do speak in English in the Bahamas but it is the fastest English you'll ever hear and not every word is a complete one.  One Bahamian described it as "We speak the way you text.")  Anyway, I decided not to wait and hope for my bag to turn up.  I asked for a taxi to take me back to the airport.  I was going to find the van.  It was ludicrous, but that's what I did.

The woman driving the taxi was name Christine, and, lucky for me, she was a friendly and out-going woman who, due to her nature, knew everyone on the island.  I jumped in and told her I had to get back to the airport to find the man in the green shirt who had put us in a van that had driven us to The Reef.  I didn't remember much, only that the driver was a nice man in his mid-fifties maybe.  And Michael remembered that the van was dark and there was a sticker about God on the windshield.

"You mean, Mr. Woods?" Christine asked me.

Mr. Woods?  Ok.  Sounds good to me.  Let's go find Mr. Woods.

Christine got on her phone and started making calls.  We talked about all of the likely people it could be and I tried to jog my memory for any other tidbits of information.  But then the excitement died down and we had a half an hour drive to the airport.  We talked a bit, but I also had a lot of time to think.  And I thought about how ridiculous it was that I thought I'd be experiencing post-traumatic stress in a fucking luxury hotel in the Bahamas.  Instead, hyper-focused and on a mission, I realized none of this was a big deal.  If I lost my purse and my wallet and my phone and my glasses, so what?  It would be a pain in the ass, but I would replace them. 

Christine kept telling me not to worry, we were going to find it.  "We can't let your vacation start like this, oh no we cannot!!  Lordy, we are going to find that purse, yes we are!!"

"If we don't, I'll be ok.  I'd like to find it, but I'll survive if we don't," I told her. 

"You sure?"  she asked me.

"I had a rough year this past year, so all of this kind of pales in comparison."  It was hard to believe I was saying it, but it was true.

"So you had cancer?" she asked.  "You know, I was thinking that when you got in my cab because I was looking at you and I was thinking "American women don't wear their hair like that.'"

"Ha, ha!  Some do!  Ellen does."

We pull into the airport.  Christine drives me through the parking lot where the taxis and the vans wait to be called and asks me if any of them look familiar.  Then she pulls into the Arrivals lane and we spot Mr. Woods' van.  She pulls over and I jump out and nearly get hit by a taxi.  I look through the windows of the van, then I get in the van, but it's completely empty.  No black purse.  I jump back into Christine's taxi and we keep going.  She's calling out the window to her friends "You seen Mr. Woods?  You seen Mr. Woods?"  Finally someone points off into the distance and we look to the left and there is Mr. Woods and he is carrying my purse.  I scream.  I jump out and give the very stoic Mr. Woods a bear hug and I don't let go when I should.  And then I ask him to wait while I get something out of my purse for him.  I hand him a "thank you" and then I give him a kiss on the cheek.  I get back into Christine's taxi and she takes me back to The Reef.  We are both in utter disbelief.

Christine, who is now my Facebook friend, said over and over on the cab ride back that "God loves you, Lauren.  He pulled you through cancer and he found your purse and God is great.  God loves you!"  And I believe her, though I don't think I believe in exactly the same God that she does.  I hadn't put it into words until recently, when, for some reason out of the blue, Willa asked me who god was.  I told her god is an idea or a force or an energy and everybody thinks about it in a different way but they call it the same thing.  I think the closest I've come to understanding my own understanding of god is in this past year.  Thinking back on the past twelve months is almost impossible.  So much of it is so unbearable to think about and go through again, even if it's just in my memory.  But if I close my eyes and feel what the last year was, I know what it feels like.  It feels like my family and friends, my husband and kids, my dads and moms, my sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and in-laws who all came to my rescue and loved me and cared for me and healed me.  I don't think that I ever knew, until this past year, how much love there was around me.  It was eye-opening and life-changing to have all of that love directed at me at once. 

I don't think that god returned my purse to me in the Bahamas.  I think a whole lot of very nice people reached out to help a stranger and that's how I got my purse back.  And all of that energy, all put together, that is god.

More Needles? And more and more??

Needles.  In my body.  All over my body.  The ones that stay there for a while.

Add it to the list of things I never thought I'd do.  Start a new list of things I never thought I'd do willingly.

---------

Michael and I sat down with my oncologist, Dr. Ruth, at the beginning of December to discuss a number of things, namely our concerns surrounding the shot I get every month (Lupron) and the new pill that I am now taking every day (Tamoxifen).  Michael had been doing some online research into these drugs and their side effects and what he found caused some concern.  Dr. Ruth's answer was two-fold:

1) Stop Googling and here is why: most people don't have any problems with these drugs but you won't hear about that on the internet because they are busy getting on with their lives and they don't have time to tell the internet about all the problems they are not having.  There are a few people who do not adjust well to the drugs and they are the ones who are up late at night posting their problems on message boards.

2) Hormone therapy is the most important part of Lauren's treatment - more important than the chemo and the radiation.  So we either take the risk with the side effects, or take the risk with the cancer.

Then the conversation turns to Quality of Life.  I love Dr. Ruth because she is kind enough to care and kind enough to ask.  I tell her that things are good, for the most part.  I have mood swings but I've always had mood swings.  I get up a couple of times during the night, but I go to bed early enough that overall I feel well-rested.  The hot flashes are a big fat pain in the ass, but I don't want to be on more drugs to treat the symptoms.  I have cut out of my diet all the things that I can reasonably cut out.  I have stopped drinking alcohol almost entirely, save for one jealous sip from Michael's glass if and when we go out to dinner.  And now I am turning down chocolate.  (Just shoot me).  I limit my sugar intake.  I only have one cup of coffee in the morning and that is simply so I don't kill my kids.  If I do all these things, I notice the hot flashes are not as brutal.  But I have body aches and muscle aches and my dentist says I'm clenching my jaw.  As nice as it sounds, I cannot be stoned every minute of the day, it just isn't practical.  I want to alleviate some of these side effects, but I don't want you to prescribe me more drugs.

DR. RUTH: I don't want to prescribe you more drugs, either.

LAUREN: Ok.  Good.  Right.  So...

DR. RUTH: I want you to go see my acupuncturist.  She is a Chinese Dragon Lady.  Kind of a witch doctor.  Straight from China.

LAUREN:  Are you talking about needles?

DR. RUTH:  Needles.  Yes.

LAUREN: And dragons??

DR. RUTH: Dragon Lady.  As in powerful, not prickly.

LAUREN:  Ok.  (pause)  I have this thing about needles....

DR. RUTH:  You are going to have to get over your thing.  Oh, and take that stupid kerchief off your head you look ridiculous.

LAUREN:  Not as ridiculous as my hair under the kerchief.

DR.  RUTH:  Take it off and let me see.

LAUREN:  I can't.

DR. RUTH: I'm your doctor and I have to see your hair growing back in.

LAUREN: No.

DR. RUTH: You look like you should be scrubbing floors.

LAUREN: Fine.  (she takes her mom's kerchief from 1975 off her head)

DR. RUTH:  You look great!!  Just watch some old Audrey Hepburn movies and you'll be fine.  Now here is Dr. Ming's phone number.  Call her today.  You might have to go in a couple of times a week at first, and your (shitty, greedy) health insurance company (CIGNA) probably won't pay for it (they didn't).  But I think you're going to like it.  If nothing else, you could use half an hour to lie on a bed and relax, right?

ENTER my new best friend DR. MING.

Dr. Ming asks me to fill out a health history form.  Dr. Ming looks over my form and, like most doctors before her, tells me it makes no sense that I got cancer.  At least I don't cry at this assertion anymore.  Progress.  Dr. Ming asks me to put on a large piece of paper with holes in it after I politely point out that it is not, in fact, a "gown" and perhaps the medical profession suffers from delusions of grandeur.  Then she asks me to lie down on the table.  She takes my pulse at my wrist which prompts her to ask if I have lower back pain.  I don't have lower back pain but I'm awfully curious what my wrist is saying about me behind my back.  Dr. Ming reaches for something off of the table by the table and starts unwrapping and I do not know that she is unwrapping needles until they start going into the back of my neck.  I don't feel anything at all except fear.  Then she puts a few in my lower back.  Then she asks me to lie down.  On my back.

LAUREN: Lie down?

MING: Yes.

LAUREN: On my back?

MING: Yes, on your back, yes.

LAUREN: But you just put needles in my back.

MING: Yes, needles in your back, lie down, yes.

LAUREN:  (after trying a number of times to lie down)  I can't.

MING: Is ok.  Lie down.  Trust me.

LAUREN: I forgot to tell you that I have a fear of needles.

MING: Is ok.  Needles will help with fear of needles.

After five minutes of this, and with every muscle in my body inappropriately tensed, I lay down.  On my back.  On the needles.  Just in case you missed that.  Ming put 30 more needles in my head, my arms, my hands, my feet, my legs...

MING: How is your sex life?

LAUREN: Um....

MING: We got to get things moving again.  We put needles in and body start to flow again.  You need flow down there?

LAUREN: Well...

MING: No flow down there?

Needles in the abdomen.  Luckily no needles down "there".  Luckily, in alternative medicine, if your head hurts, the doctor rubs your left ankle.  If your arm hurts, the doctor looks at your right ear.  If you have no sex life because your oncologist is putting you through menopause at the age of 37, then your Chinese acupuncturist Dragon Lady Witch Doctor will put a round of needles around your uterus.

Ming finishes and turns off the lights.  She tells me she will be back in half an hour and I should spend the time breathing into the needles.  When the door closes and I am alone in a dark room on Park and 39th with only needles and crinkly paper for company, I realize there is nothing to do but give in.  I start to breathe into the needles.  I start to relax.  I gradually find all the tension everywhere in my body and let it go.  The release feels good and the tears start to flow, letting me know that I am indeed releasing.

I don't fall asleep as Dr. Ming wants me to, instead my mind races.  I think about my neighbor Chloe and how much she would love this.  I think about my kids and my husband and what the new year is going to bring.  I think about the holidays that are coming up and how busy everyone is and how nice it would be if everyone weren't.  I try to reign it in and meditate.  It works for a second and a half but I am too amped up with ideas and one thought leading to the next and the next and suddenly I am writing a script for HBO.

Half an hour passes and I am sure that when I get off this table I will be a bundle of energy and I will race home to all of the decorating and present wrapping that awaits.  Dr. Ming takes the needles out and tapes little black seeds inside my ears "for balance" or something alternative like that.  She tells me to get dressed and when I reach for my clothes I find I can't move.  I am stoned.  Really, really, I-have-been-smoking-all-day-stoned.  I manage to dress and pay Ming and give her a stoner hug and then I hail a cab. The rest of the afternoon is shot.  I am so relaxed I can only manage a couch or an arm chair.  I definitely can't manage bath time or books, or the kids brushing their teeth.  "WE DON'T WANT TO BRUSH OUR TEETH TONIGHT!!"  Fine.  Don't.  Mommy don't care.  Somehow I did get dinner on the table but I don't remember how I did that.  Michael looks at me and wants to know what's wrong with me and why the kids aren't in bed and I tell him "Mommy is relaxed.  That's why."

Happiness Is

Metamorphosis

Physical changes.  Emotional changes.  One is not easier or harder than the other.  But I’m going through both at the same time and the dials are turned nearly all the way up.

Physical update:  Radiation is done.  Skin is no longer peeling, instead freckling.  My left breast is smaller and higher than my right and I still don’t know if I care.  I have to wait 3 to 6 months to do anything anyway because the skin is still healing, but I don’t know if I have it in me to through surgery again.

Still getting Lupron shots once a month.  These keep my estrogen levels low so that if the cancer remains or comes back, estrogen is not present to feed it.  Low estrogen level puts me through menopause so I ride an emotional roller coaster.  My husband reminds me of this when I want to go to bed at 9pm because I hate the world and my therapist reminds me of this when I sit in her office and weep about my hair and wonder out loud why I am weeping about my hair.  So I have some very low days.  But they are matched with high ones and in the middle are beautifully ordinary days where nothing happens at all.  Those are my favorite. 

Hot Flash is now my middle name.  As such, my wardrobe consists strictly of layers – tank tops under shirts under sweaters topped with scarves and knit hats.  Because not only does my body temperature reach a boiling point once an hour, it also plunges to freezing within the same period of time giving bipolar a brand new meaning.

My doctor wrote me a prescription for a very mild dose of Effexor which is supposed to help mitigate hot flashes though it’s typically used to treat depression.  I took one pill a couple of months ago and turned into a zombie.  I decided I’d rather strip off my clothes every 60 minutes than be a zombie so I shelved the bottle with the 27 other meds I’ve been given this year.  When I opened the medicine cabinet and Willa saw my collection she said “Wow, mommy.  You have a lot of vitamins.”  I didn’t know she knew the word ‘vitamin.’

Sleeping is a joke.  Really quite comical.  When I get into bed I am freezing so I bundle up into the soft warm pajamas that Antha sent me for my mastectomy and shiver under the covers for a bit.  I want to sleep on my stomach to get comfortable but my breasts must still be healing inside because when I lay on them they grow angry fangs and seek revenge.  I have discovered that if I tuck a thick pillow under the lower half of my torso and place my head on another pillow, a little bit of space is created for my breasts to free fall.  Now I am comfortable and can fall asleep.  Until my first hot flash.  Then the covers come off, thrown (angrily?) onto my husband, and I roll onto my back, arms and legs splayed in a desperate search for cold air.  The hot flash passes, my body cools down, and I fall asleep again only to wake up an hour later from a dream that I am naked on an iceberg.  I am shivering because I have no covers on and my pajama top is pulled up to my chin.  The key throughout this process, repeated two or three times a night, is to not wake up.  For any level of consciousness invites a minimum two hours of fierce and rapid brain activity around completely mundane topics like frozen peas and Miley Cyrus.  It is then that I wish breast cancer had gone ahead and killed me.

And then there is the issue of my hair.  It is growing in, though it is still quite short, so I have what others are calling a Pixie Cut but since I did not actually cut my hair into this fashion, I am calling it a Pixie Grow.  Not to be confused with the cute pixie cuts that you might see laying obediently flat against the heads of Jennifer Lawrence and Pamela Anderson and Michelle Williams and who else?  No, my pixie wants to curl.  I have little hair flips happening all over but most notably above and behind my ears.  And these are not easily tamed with hair product.  Or even three or four hair products.  The hair at my forehead wants to curl up too so I can either wear it greased and plastered against my forehead or I can simply allow it to make a shelf.  A hair shelf.  My hair is winning and I am losing. When I look in the mirror I just say “Fuck it.”

Emotional update:  Dentist says I am grinding my teeth.  Holding tension in my jaw.  And sadly, even while consciously trying to relax, tension builds.  I spend more minutes out of everyday identifying and relaxing areas of tension than anything else.  But if I spend the next year doing this, I might just suddenly become a Buddhist and I would love to suddenly become a Buddhist without really knowing what one is.

When I’m not taking care of the kids and the house and my body and my mind, you can find me volunteering at the school.  Last week I started reading with other peoples’ kids during their lunch hour, to give them a little extra practice.  They are all sweet, even the ones who are completely out of control, and I don’t mind being called Lady Gaga for no discernible reason.  Then I’ll go down into the chaos of the lunch room to volunteer.  The Kindergarteners and 1^st graders have twenty minutes to sit down, get their lunch, eat their lunch, clean up their lunch, and get the hell out so the next 200 kids can come in.  The parent volunteers help them open yogurts and thermoses and BPA-free boxes and get them water and forks and remind them to sit down and stop running around and EAT!! even though it’s only 11am.  Then we sweep up entire grocery stores of food that have ended up on the floor and separate the trash into recycling, compost, and garbage.  We wipe down the tables and clean the floors before the next group of kids sits down.  And I cannot explain why it is my favorite part of the day.

 

I also cannot explain why I don’t like talking to my friends anymore.  I don’t return phone calls and I’ll respond to an email weeks after I’ve received it.  I find it very, very hard to discuss my current life with anyone who is not actually in my current life.  I also don’t like the idea of dragging people down with all that I continue to go through.  And then there is the anger and frustration that I have cancer and they don't.  So I am this now and they are that still and do we really have anything in common anymore? 

I don’t feel like the same person.  And I don’t look like her either.  So I am in metamorphosis.  And it’s really, really...uncomfortable.

Last Day

25 Days.  Finally.  Done.  

My radiation treatment drew to a close this afternoon during an all-too-appropriate rain storm in midtown Manhattan where scaffolding was my umbrella.  Similarly appropriate was the shot I took in my right butt cheek earlier in the morning, to start the day off right.  My skin is red and sensitive but not peeling.  Nurse Barbara tells me I will be tired all week and my skin will get worse before it gets better.  But doesn't everything?!  I don't care.  Not having to go north of 14th Street for another month is the greatest gift of all.

So I was sick in bed all weekend.  (What did you do?!)  I caught a virus a few weeks back that I have not been able to shake.  As my radiation technician put it, my "immune system has been a little busy."  Nurse Beth tells me it's going around and many of her patients have been worried that there is something terribly wrong with them because they get it, feel better, and then get it again.  As did I.  And the cure is to stay in bed for a week.  Who does that?!?!  It's not as fun as one would imagine.  It's not all movies and books and catching up on email and phone calls because my head hurts and I can't read or think and I hate all actors right now because I'm not one anymore.  

But my super-hero husband and his mom came to the rescue and I got two days in bed.  I was restored enough to get up this morning to make breakfast and lunches for the kids and get them off to school dressed, with teeth brushed, homework in their backpacks, and snack for 30 kids for Michael to carry.  After that, all I needed was two Advil and a taxi to get me uptown for my shot before I came back downtown for a nap.

Nurse Beth didn't recognize me, she's not the first, and I haven't been able to shrug these off yet.  Now that my hair has grown in a tiny bit, I am going out without my scarves on.  Some mom friends saw my head last week during a hot flash, saw that I have hair, and told me to stop wearing my mom's kerchief from 1976.  But now if I run into someone who is not expecting to see me, they don't seem to recognize me.  Or maybe they do but they are so overcome with disbelief and sadness that I had cancer and my thick long hair is now completely gone, not just hypothetically hiding under a piece of fabric?  Because I don't know for sure, I don't know whether to introduce myself or just play along or... what would some other options be?  Should I be wearing a name tag?

Also, as pathetic and superficial as it sounds, I really do miss my hair.  I know the little pixie cut is "cute," but I'm not sure how well I pull off cute.  I've never been a "cute" girl, my name is not Zooey, and I look ridiculous in knee-high socks.  I much prefer a black leather jacket over a black ensemble with some boots.  Add a pixie cut and sunglasses to hide behind, and I end up looking a little angry.  Not cute at all.  Plus, it's not even a hair cut.  It's hair growth.  Yuk.  My wig will be another option as soon as October decides to stop acting like mid-June.  But there's definitely no such thing as global warming.

But you know how you really know you are a cancer patient?  It's when you are on the radiation table, receiving your final treatment, and you find yourself dreaming about the kale salad you are going to eat for lunch.  Then, still on the table, you have a hot flash.  And then, still on the table, these lyrics come through on the speakers from the Cancer Center playlist:

"Cause you had a bad day 

You're taking one down

You sing a sad song just to turn it around..."

The nurse who comes in to take the sheet off your naked boob hears the end of the song and is mortified.  She apologizes on behalf of everyone but you tell her it's ok because it actually made you laugh, not cry.

And that's how you know you are a cancer patient.

BECAUSE LIFE IS NOT ALL RAINBOWS AND CUPCAKES!!!

(Right, Boehner?!)

Sick Again

And miserable. Too much crying and feeling sorry for myself. So I am playing this awesome game that my girl Katharine made for me.

When I get five in a row, I'm supposed to buy myself something nice. In the past twenty-four hours, I've bought out the fifth floor at Barney's. 

Two More Days of Radiation