Cancer's Foot in the Door
There is no returning to life before the diagnosis
Back in the room, in the Swedish design chair, feet up on the orange faux leather “krakk”. Another needle. Everything in this room is slick and sharp, or tacky and tight.
I never had problems with needles before. My veins have always hopped around, and often it would take a phlebotomist a couple of tries to pierce one. Now things are different. It takes the experienced nurses four or five tries. One frustrated nurse once insisted on going for my left arm, the one in danger of developing lymphedema, the one that guidelines specify to avoid sticking, squeezing, prodding.
I didn’t cry often during chemo. Once while putting on my black, high top converse to head to the hospital for a round of the red devil. Once in my GP’s laboratory when the phlebotomist stuck me. And stuck me. And stuck me. I had to assure her that I wasn’t in that much pain.
I learned that day that our threshold for pain sometimes doesn’t have anything to do with the physical sensation of pain. I know this is probably obvious. We’ve all seen tired toddlers cry uncontrollably over a bump they otherwise wouldn’t have registered, knowing it wasn’t theatrics, but awareness and a related sensitivity.
Last year I had a personal trainer who told me that pain was all in my head. (I’d mentioned the pain I have in my intercostal muscles when doing abdominal exercises due to radiation.) I already knew how pain receptors, pain signals, and the brain work. And that day I realized he wasn’t the personal trainer I needed.
Having watched more than my share of medical dramas, I think of the word friable. I have no idea if my intercostal muscles or my veins are actually friable, but I know that more than once, a nurse has taped the cannula down, sighed in relief, then watched the saline bubble under my skin and cursed a little under her breath. But I’ve never had a nurse feel it was appropriate to tell me my pain was all in my head. Even when I know she would have loved to make the discomfort of the next attempt to hit—but not damage—a vein easier on both of us.
Since treatment began, the line between physical and mental discomfort has become more difficult to identify. The pills make my joints ache, so it’s guesswork in determining how long I need restoration after a hard workout. Is it DOMs? Is it Letrozole? Should I push through? Rest? Will a side-lying torso lift snap the radiated muscles between my ribs? Or will it strengthen them? Am I depressed?
Last Monday was my third round of Zometa. While the red devil is a kind of bacteria, and the second chemotherapy is distilled from the needles of the Yew tree, this last treatment is an acid. As far as I can tell, it’s a man-made poison designed not to kill cancer, but to make the bones inhospitable to its potential settling in the marrow. Though it stays in the body for up to two years, the side effects are mild: a brief flu-like response. I felt nothing the first two times I had the treatment. But last Monday, it came at it me like riptide and pulled me into a pretty dark place.
It wasn’t until yesterday I felt optimistic again. Not about anything in particular, as I hadn’t been down about anything in particular, but my thoughts were lighter in general.
Leonard pushes his cheek into my lips. He wants kissing noises. He closes his eyes and leans his neck into the hollow of my neck and shoulder. Surgery for his cancerous chest is scheduled for next week. Until then he’s on painkillers and antibiotics. But we go for morning walks again now that my foot is better. He tugs as usual. Scans for the scent of hare, or bits of bread one of the seagulls may have dropped during a mid-air tussle.
At 5 am the sun is already up now, and has burned off most of the night’s damp. Ducklings follow the hen in calm arcs over the lake’s surface. A great crested grebe sits on an exposed nest too close to the shore for comfort, but Leonard isn’t a bird dog, and doesn’t care. Silent black and white birds dart back and forth. House Martins. In Norwegian they’re called roof swallows, but I think they’re like little sports cars of the skies, racing towards summer.
Five weeks left of the school year. My calendar is full of uncertainties. Including Leonard’s presence, since his cancer may yet prove to be in his stomach or lungs. At nine, being such a big dog, it starts to become a question of quality of life.
All these thoughts about quality of life and morality in general creep around almost everything I do these days. The writing, the teaching, in the fact that I spent an unforgivable amount of money putting extensions in my hair in an effort to recognize myself—as an attempt take back my life as it was.
But I will never be the person I was before I understood that there are cancer cells floating round inside my body. I’m not sure how I feel about that fact that this oh-so-natural dis-ease connects me to other people in my life, people who were overwhelmed by it in these past three years. My boss. My first husband. My best friend. My mother. And now, as I write this, my aunt—my only surviving matrilineal relative.
It is a strange web of cells, of life-gone-mad. There’s a stickiness about the disease that I think of everytime my skin rubs uncomfortable against the orange faux leather of the chemo chair. Like spit or urine or pus, this sticky, tacky interface with the world is a part of what makes life, life.
Right?
This week I’ve been asking myself what I am doing with this substack. How narrow a focus, what purpose the words… Thank you all for bearing with me through this transition.
While I’ve been questioning the ethics of writing about my grandmother, my mother, and the other women in my family, today I am beginning to believe it might be more of a service than a betrayal not letting us all die without telling our stories in the context of the one, bigger story.
And maybe the one bigger than that.
Warmly,
Ren
(No audio today, because I think I might cry if I begin making sounds.)