By Mary Ann Noe
“You have triple negative breast cancer, the most aggressive kind. So, you have a choice: we can wait, or we can start the standard protocol of chemotherapy and radiation.”
Wait, I have a choice? Really? What kind of choice is that? I’d like to stay on this side of the grass, thank you very much, so let’s go with the standard. Hope it’s the Gold Standard.
One thing you discover when you are a woman, and you lose all your hair—and I mean all your hair—is that you can’t pee straight. Like a two-year old boy who isn’t tall enough to pee standing up and has to sit on the toidy, you find the pee spraying all over the floor. Which causes another problem all by itself, of course. But there is a solution: slide your buns back farther. Simple.
In spite of that, there are advantages to losing all your hair. Oh yes, there are. For one, you no longer have to shave your legs or armpits. If your estrogen has already left the building for a younger woman, the point is moot. No hair left to shave anyway.
This comes under the umbrella of chemotherapy. Don’t you just love the term “chemotherapy”? Therapy is something good for you. Therapy is something that’ll help fix things. Like physical therapy. After twisting your back into a pretzel trying to get the wheelbarrow out of the garden shed, physical therapy can give you your dignity back. No longer will you look like Quasimodo, all bent over and all. Therapy is a wonderful thing.
Chemotherapy helps fix things too. In the long run. In the short run, you’re putting yourself in the hands of a person who is probably the most recent descendant of the Borgia family. You know the ones. Cesare and his half-sister Lucrezia loved to lace things with arsenic, both of whom get credit for killing people. Anyway. That’s the “chemo” part. Of course, they won’t kill you, but let’s face it, it is poison. I took to calling my unseen male pharmacist Lucrezio Borgia. When I finally did meet him, I thanked him for getting good grades in pharmacy school and now getting my doses right. “Any stronger,” I told him, “and you would’ve killed the client.” He sent me a crooked smile, nodded and said, “Yup, it would’ve.” Controlled poisoning is apparently okay. It’s therapy. Must’ve worked. I’m still here to tell the story.
I named it my Spa Treatment. Why not? I got to stretch out on a comfortable recliner, or once, on a lounge bed with lots of pillows. They hooked me up to syringes about two feet long and as big around as an anaconda. The stuff inside—AC, or Adriamycin and Cyclophosphamide—must’ve been pretty strong. The nurses came in looking like deep-sea divers in those haz-mat suits, gloves and masks included. And me in shorts and a t-shirt. Go figure.
I loved the nurses, but they told me to think of the chemicals as strawberry margaritas, because the solution was red. “Are you kidding?!” I asked. I like strawberry margaritas!” I went with red Kool-Aid.
With the addition of Benadryl in some of the treatments, I was off in la-la land in a second. Ordinarily, I could read, nap, watch television—I never did; that just didn’t fit the spa image—or chat with the nurses popping in and out. They plied me with water and crackers.
Speaking of water, apparently, they were not only poisoning me, but trying to drown me as well. When they said, “This stuff we give you tends to dehydrate you, so drink lots of water,” they didn’t mean two or three measly glasses a day. They wanted eight or ten.
Do you realize how many trips to the bathroom that meant? It’s fine when I’m home but maneuvering an IV rack did not make for easy travel. Waltzing Matilda and I made frequent trips to the bathroom just down from my spa room. I must’ve looked like a dog walker trying to keep the dog under control while the leash wound around one ankle and the opposite wrist. We occasionally did actually waltz, as I tried to extricate myself from the loops of one tube or another. Once in the bathroom, you simply must untangle or there’s not enough length of tubing to keep Waltzing Matilda from tipping over while you lower yourself to do what you came to do.
I also made a sign that read “Everybody’s Different.” I also made them for a couple of friends in the same boat. It got set up every time we went to check in with the doctor. “Do you think I’ll be nauseous?” Answer: “Everybody’s different.” “Will my hair fall out?” Answer: “Everybody’s different.” “Will this make my fingernails turn purple?” Answer: “Everybody’s different.”
I can answer all of those questions for you: “Everybody’s different…”
One sure thing was the anti-nausea drugs. They are so good that I never met anyone who was truly nauseous. Bonus: I could eat as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I never gained weight. Six meals a day, you say? Done! I love to eat, and this was the only time in my life I could eat with impunity. Take that, fat cells!
That didn’t mean it was all easy. Getting toward the end of one particular protocol, I sat on the couch, unable to lie down, knowing I didn’t have the strength to sit up again, crying into my husband’s shoulder until I ran out of energy to do even that. My toes and fingers got cold and my body said to me, “Look, we can only maintain the heart and lungs. Everything else is going to have to take care of itself. If we run out of the energy needed for breathing and pulsing, we’re done.” I felt my life force, faint as it was, retreat to my core, and all I could do was watch. I did summon enough to call the nurse and she assured me, “You’re experiencing a normal recovery. You’ll be fine.” The third day found me able to lift my head, eat a little something, think a bit clearer. Recovery, to the point of feeling almost normal, took another two weeks. By which time I was on the next round of poison. But it was a much kinder cocktail.
But you want more advantages? The Spa Treatments do sometimes work just like that expensive ranch in—where is it now? Tucson? What Tucson can do for your complexion Spa Treatments can accomplish in a few hours. And they cost a lot more too, so you can brag about having spent a fortune on your face. In a short time, your face will look like a Georgia peach, all pink and glowing. Minus the fuzz, of course. Because remember, all hair, including any facial sprouting, is gone. Meanwhile your skin will look ever so wonderfully creamy.
Speaking of hair, I never did lose all the hair on my head. When I could pull out little tufts, I hustled to the hairdresser and got a buzz cut. (My grandkids called it “bumblebee fuzz.”) I never knew it, but my platinum hair had been comprised of a harmonious pairing of white and dark hairs, nicely cuddled up to one another. After a few trips to the Spa, the dark hairs disappeared, down the shower drain, I assume. As it grew out, it went from bumblebee fuzz to teddy bear fur. The grandkids had endless entertainment running their hands through—well, across my hair, and I got a free head massage out of it.
The big problem with losing/buzzing hair on my head is that every hat made me look like I was in the witness protection program. Hat brims mysteriously slid down clear to the eyebrows. Lucky I have ears, or the entire face would’ve disappeared.
One night, I peered in the mirror as I was getting ready for bed. I thought, I don’t remember putting eyeliner on this morning. By the way, eyeliner is a great way to fake eyelashes in case you lose yours, as I did. So anyway, I started delicately removing the eyeliner. But it wouldn’t come off. So, I scrubbed. Nothing. Had I used permanent marking pen by mistake? I leaned in closer. Lo and behold! My eyelashes were growing back! And all of them at once. Little baby eyelashes, but eyelashes, nonetheless.
From spa treatments, I advanced to Topless Beach visits, commonly known as radiation. By this time, I shed any modicum of modesty. I had been poked, prodded, palpated, photographed, positioned so much that the directive “If you could just slip off your robe…” became ho-hum. I could walk into the radiation room, drop my robe on the nearest chair and saunter over to the table without batting an eyelash. Oh, wait. I didn’t have any eyelashes to bat.
Daily humdrum routine. That is, until I turned around one day after doffing my robe and came face to face with my new radiation technician. A male. And a former student. Yikes!
What does one do then? Come on, we’re all professionals here. He was a professional tech, and I was a professional client. So, I merely said, “Hi, Paul. Good to see you after so many years.” He cracked a big smile and said, “I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me.” We strolled over to the table and all was well from then on. The world of cancer treatments can throw you any number of unusual curves. All of which you can handle with aplomb, if you have to.
External radiation uses x-rays, gamma rays, and charged particles. What went in me first actually went through me, and on forever. Or as the tech said, “It’ll go clear through you and right on down to China.” I hoped someone over there in China was also receiving the benefits of their own personal radiation therapy. Of course, it doesn’t really work that way. Beside the fact that, opposite most of the contiguous United States lies the Indian Ocean. Nobody to benefit there.
The second round consisted of electrons, which could be focused to a certain depth. I assume they’re still charging around inside somewhere, searching for a positive bonding experience. See, electrons are negative, so . . . A positive bonding experience? Oh, never mind.
Luckily, for me most of the crappy stuff was over pretty quickly. The poison regimen and the “topless beach” of radiation stopped. Seven months, surgery to treatment finish line.
The nails grew back. The hair grew back (finer and thinner, but all there), the scars faded, the energy level rose. Exercise could increase in difficulty again.
Speaking in the past tense was a particular pleasure. “Yeah, I had cancer, but it’s gone now.”
Thank you, God. And doctors and nurses and pharmacists and family and… It took a world of people to make my sense of mortality tangible.