round two

Today is my second chemo treatment.  Chemotherapy is a lot like boxing.  You do what you can to get in shape — sleep, exercise, eat well — and then it’s time to climb into the ring. 

And inevitably, climbing into the ring entails getting your butt kicked.   Because, unlike boxing, there is no referee and there are no rules.  And there is no tapping out.  You just take the punches as best you can, and when it’s over you lick your wounds and try to heal in time for the next round. 

Today is round #2 for me.  After this, I’ll have 2 down, 6 to go.  And after this round, if statistics are correct, I’ll start to lose my hair.  I think it’ll be strange to see the bald version of me — a version I’ve never seen before.  But I’m trying to gear myself up for it.  I tell myself that it’s a battle scar, a sign that I am fighting this disease as hard as I can.  I tell myself that losing my hair means that the chemo is working — it’s killing all the rapidly-dividing cells in my body, including hair follicles.  I tell myself that my hair will grow back before I know it. 

But in the end, I feel like everything I tell myself is a lame attempt to distract myself from the sadness I will feel at sacrificing one more thing to this stupid disease.

the problem of food

 My mom’s coming into town today, just in time for my next chemo treatment tomorrow.  In preparation for her visit, I went grocery shopping last night.  I used to love grocery shopping — it was fun to walk down the aisles and look at the newest products and try save as much money as possible by finding all the sales….but after having cancer, that changed.

Ask any cancer patient what it’s like to go grocery shopping after you’ve been diagnosed, and you’ll most likely get a deer-in-the-headlights stare.  Because after you hear the words, ‘you have cancer,’ you never look at food the same way again. 

Last year I was out of work for 5 weeks after my mastectomy.  During that time, friends and people from church brought meals, and family members from out of town came to visit and went grocery shopping for me. 

And then everyone flew home or left town or went back to their ‘normal’ life, which didn’t include me being sick, and I was left to fend for myself.  I went to the grocery store one evening, expecting to breeze through and get the same items I got every week and be checked out and back to the car within 30 minutes.  I’m single, so grocery shopping is not usually a big production.

But as soon as I walked into that grocery store last year, I felt ambushed by ever single aisle.  I went to buy some fruit, but was interrupted by a voice in my head suggesting that maybe I’d gotten cancer because of the pesticides sprayed on the produce.  I put the apples down and walked away. 

Next was the meat section.  Everything I looked at made me wonder, “Did I get cancer because I ate that?  Were there too many antibiotics or hormones in the chicken?  Did I get cancer from charbroiled steak?” 

In the spice aisle, I went looking for sugar.  I looked at the boxes of artificial sweetener and heard a stern voice in my head warn, “Don’t buy that — it causes cancer.” 

 And it was the same all through the store — the white bread, the skim milk, the fresh vegetables, the deli meats, the sugary cereals, the soy cheese…everything I looked at triggered the thought, “Maybe that’s why you got cancer…”

I finally pushed the cart to the front of the store and left empty-handed and in tears.

A few months later, after doing so amature nutritional research, I came up with a food strategy that didn’t make me feel guilty.  I ate 7-8 servings of fresh, organic produce a day, drank hormone-free milk, and ate cage free eggs and chicken.  I drank organic coffee and lots of green tea.  I didn’t use any sweeteners or sugar; I drank the coffee and tea unsweetened, with just a splash of milk. 

And, less than a year after my first diagnosis, my cancer came back.  My body sabotaged my best efforts. 

Now that I’m on chemo and losing weight, I’m on the eat-whatever-the-heck-you-want plan so I can keep on enough weight to stick with my dose-dense chemo schedule.  I eat anything with calories: cheeseburgers, salad with ranch dressing, yougurt parfaits, pizza, Chinese food, ice cream, macaroni and cheese, and whatever else sounds good.

I don’t think it’s all that healthy, but I do think it’s necessary to eat like this so I can get through treatment without becoming a skeleton.  I can grocery shop with less guilt now.  I remind myself that this is only temporary, food is medicine, calories matter most. 

I’ll be finished with treatment in 5 months.  Maybe then I’ll resort back to my neurotic, guilt-ridden, compulsive grocery shopping habits.

In the beginning…

One thousand women under the age of 30 are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in America, according to a 2000 study by the American Cancer Society.  In 2006, at the age of 27, I became one of those women.  I was diagnosed with non-invasive breast cancer (called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS) and I had a bilateral mastectomy.

Last month, April of 2007, during a surgery to put in saline implants, my plastic surgeon found a lump that he sent off to the pathology lab.  It came back positive for invasive cancer.  I had a second surgery a week later to take out all of the cancerous tissue.  Then I had CAT scans, bone scans, a heart scan, blood work, and I had a port placed (a port is a long catheter inserted into a vein under the collar bone).  I started chemo on May 16th…I’ll have four months of chemo and six weeks of radiation, followed by five years of a drug called Tamoxifen to try to prevent the cancer from coming back.

 I was really sick (nausea/vomiting) for a few days after my first chemo treatment.  I’m hoping it goes better this time around.  I used to have long blonde hair, but I got it cut a few weeks ago and donated to Locks of Love.  Now I have a short pixie cut that I’m still getting used to.   It doesn’t feel like me — my hair has never been this short — but it’s going to fall out within the week anyway, so what does it matter?