Tag Archives: Jesus

How to Get Through Chemo

Aug 17, 2014 Cancer, Faith + Scripture, Keeping Your Chin Up, Pre-Recovery , , , Leave a Comment

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I was going to title this post, “How to Beat Cancer,” but, I think that’s premature, considering I’m not 5 years out yet. Still, time will tell if the same strategy applies. What I know now is How to Get Through Chemo.

Chemotherapy is no picnic. It’s hard enough, as a woman, to lose your breasts, and if chemo takes your hair, your eyebrows, and eyelashes, it’s even harder. When you look in the mirror, you don’t even recognize yourself – on a good day, you’re an extra from I Am Legend. On a bad day, you’re Uncle Fester. Or maybe it’s vice-versa. Either way, you feel like a freakshow, and all you want to do is stay home and curl into a fetal position.

There is another factor, of course. Many women facing breast cancer are (like me) real “Type-As.” We are the driven, strong ones everyone else relies on, and the worst part of getting sick is entertaining the idea that we might (gasp!) be mortal. It’s hard enough facing the fact ourselves, but letting our friends in on the secret?! Or worse, our family?! Unthinkable!!

The worst thing you can do after a breast cancer diagnosis is hole up. I mean it: YOU MUST NOT RETREAT. It’s so so SO tempting to batten down the hatches and hide away until your hair grows back, to turn down requests to accompany you to chemo because you don’t want people to see you vulnerable. It’s the WORST thing you can do and you will have a terribly hard time Getting Through Chemo alone.

I’ve been where you are. I’ve made it through the deaths of two parents and four grandparents, two financial crises, seven triathlons, three careers, two marathons, a graduate degree and nursing my only sibling through a horrible divorce ALONE. I have carried burden after burden all by myself; I pride myself on being able to pull my own weight in any situation and when I was diagnosed with Stage IIIA Triple Negative Breast Cancer 3500 miles away from all my family and most of my friends, I told myself, “I can get through ANYTHING all by myself, and cancer is no different.”

I’m here to tell you: I was WRONG, and I am incredibly lucky I wasn’t dead wrong.

Cancer is NOT the time to bravely soldier on alone. Three days after my second Taxol treatment, after four very tough cycles of Adriamycin and Cytoxan, I was hit with the worst depression I’ve ever experienced in my life. I found myself crying hysterically at the foot of my bed, wanting to wash the last of the Vicodin from my lumpectomy surgery with the last of the tequila in my freezer. I felt so helpless and hopeless, I wanted to walk into the woods behind my house, curl up into a ball, and never wake up.

I credit three people with saving my life that weekend: my roommate, a fellow survivor, and one of my chemo nurses. My roommate sensed something was wrong when I woke up the next morning, and asked me to stop by her office before my chemo appointment that afternoon. When I got there, she introduced me to her coworker, who was a ten-year survivor of Stage IV breast cancer. I burst into tears when I met her, and told her I was terrified of the thoughts I had been having. She told me that she’d battled with depression during her chemo also, then looked me straight in the eye and said, dead serious, “You have to call in the troops.” I went to chemo and, instead of putting a brave face on for my nurses, I let myself cry in front of them, and confessed I wasn’t having a good day. For someone like me, who was always cracking jokes and making people laugh in Infusion Services, it was a huge admission. Chemo nurses, of course, are a special breed, and one of my nurses offered to do a healing touch therapy on me while I was receiving my meds (something they probably don’t teach at medical assistant schools). I took her up on it and when I woke up after treatment, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

I’ll never know if it was my roommate reaching out to me, her coworker giving me permission to ask for help, or my reaching out to my chemo nurses that lightened the load I was carrying. What I do know is this: when you feel like “turtling”; when you want to hide from your friends and family, rather than face them in a weakened, vulnerable state, you must do the OPPOSITE: you must REACH OUT. Let them be the source of strength they want to be for you!

In my moments of darkness, I asked the same question Jesus asked on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I felt so alone, so far away from what was supposed to be the Source of my strength at my lowest point. What I didn’t know was that He had surrounded me with angels to be there for me in His place. God loves us through other people. We just have to be open and receptive of that love. All around me were people waiting for the opportunity to be my rocks of Gibraltar, and if I had kept on insisting I didn’t need anyone’s help, I might have thrown myself into that pit of despair, for fear of appearing weak! Don’t do it. Don’t worry so much about appearing strong that you break from the pressure. People all around you love you no matter what, and are waiting to be there for you, if you let them. Call in the troops. You won’t win the battle without them.

This is How You Get Through Chemo: by Opening Up, not Holing Up.

 

If you doubt the power of strength, power, and beauty in numbers, check out this video: Playing For Change.

The Case For White-Knuckling It

Aug 17, 2014 Faith + Scripture, Keeping Your Chin Up, Pre-Recovery , Leave a Comment

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

I realized today that sometimes, you just have to white-knuckle it.

I have a few interns graduating from high school in Richmond, CA. If you’re not familiar with Richmond, it’s a very tough place to grow up. Seated right next to Chevron’s biggest petroleum refinery west of the Mississippi, it’s full of toxic chemicals. The parks are run down and while there is change coming to the City, it wasn’t changing much when many of my students were growing up. Sometimes, I think it’s a miracle they’ve made it this far in one piece, with their sanity intact.

I went down to a local JC today to sort out a clerical error for one of my kids – someone used his ID number to register, then drop out of a class. They say he owes them $21 for a on-unit course, and he can’t register for classes at a sister JC closer to home until it’s paid. I mean, this kid doesn’t have $8 for the BART to come out here to fix it, let alone $21 to pay it. He’s saving every dime so he can get his first apartment, and being a young African-American man from Richmond, even one with a great resume, he’s having trouble finding a job in this economy. He asked me, frustrated beyond belief, why everything has to be so hard. Ah, kid, I wanted to say, I am so not the one to ask right now.

The reason is this: I’d just realized I had done the math wrong this month, and I have three chemo sessions left, not two. Then, my doctor told me that the thing on my tailbone I thought was a staph infection from my gym’s nasty locker room was actually shingles. Which is also why the headaches I’ve been getting are not going away no matter how much water I drink. The best part is, I can’t take anything but over-the-counter pain medication, because I have to drive myself to the doctor four times a week for shots, bloodwork, and chemo.

If you’ve ever put pressure on a shingles-inflamed nerve, it’s not pleasant. Not at all. Which is why I am wincing when Marlon asks me why everything has to be so hard, I know how he feels. I know the feeling that it’s just not going to get any easier anytime soon. In those times, I now realize, you just have to white-knuckle It. You just have to get through it, because no amount of vision-boarding or Madonna-album-listening, or positive-affirmation-ing is going to make the pain and frustration go away.

The worst pain I’ve ever been in was the week I had my gallbladder taken out. I didn’t even have a gallstone; I had like “gall-sludge” – a slimy, grainy-textured, tar-sand-like substance clogging my bile duct. The pain was excruciating; I was out of my mind from the second I walked into the hospital to the moment the morphine took effect. It felt like an alien made of boulders was trying to claw its way out of my chest and I was literally watching the second hand on the clock, thinking two more minutes and the nurse will be here, thirty more seconds and she’ll find a vein, five more seconds and it will be in my bloodstream, knowing that as soon as my body metabolized it, the pain would abate.

Knowing there will be an end to pain makes it so much easier to get through, of course. It’s thinking that life is going to be hard forever that makes you want it over. In the Book of Job, the Devil says to God, “You know, even your best followers only follow you because their lives are blessed. If you took away everything they had, they wouldn’t be so penitent.” So God says, “Okay, fine – there’s Job – go to town. Take away anything you want from him.” And Job loses everything – his kids, his business, his house, all of it. Still, Job believes in God and doesn’t question Him. Finally, Job’s friends are like, “Dude, you are not perfect, but still, how can you deserve this? You need to take it up with God, you need to ask Him what you’ve done to be so punished.” God, hearing Job’s friends question His judgement, interrupts them and says, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” (which would be Hebrew for “Who are YOU to question ME?”)

Theologians typically suggest that the central question of the book of Job is, “Is misfortune always divine punishment?” and in my opinion, the Book of Job says no. We’re not at the mercy of a capricious God, and we’re not always bearing the burden of His wrath. In times of misfortune, I take comfort in the Book of Jeremiah, where God says He has a plan for me. I may not know what it is; it may be confusing sometimes. I may feel like the Karate-fucking-Kid, waxing on and waxing off and painting houses all day while He’s out fishing! But I have to trust that it’s all part of His plan, and that, like Job, faith and trust are rewarded. Even if you want to get all existential and say the only reward for faith in a Higher Power is feeling like misery isn’t pointless…. sometimes, that can be enough to make you want to go on living.

So many times in my life, I have been able to use past disasters to put things in perspective, either for myself or for others. Time and again, I have made it through hard times to enjoy an abundant and happy life. We never know what God has planned for us; we can only take comfort in what is, and pray for strength, patience, and understanding if it isn’t what we want. I told Marlon, when he asked me why life has to be so hard, that sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes it’s easy, and the only thing we can control is our reaction to it. When you don’t think you have the strength to bear a burden, and none of your positive thinking is helping, the answer is to hold on, let the tears fall, and white-knuckle it ’till it’s over.