Today I start my "last" chemotherapy treatment, Round #5, four days straight after a week's postponement due to yet another low white-blood count. I quietly dread it. I have no choice but to accept what's to come. And that's an attack on my person. What does that entail? Let's see...
A few days in, nothing really. Then, a delayed punch in the gut that you're not prepared for. (I suppose I'm better prepared, but that makes it even more frightening and distasteful.) Your body doesn't even recognize the impact of the hit and run until you feel the after-effects. You hardly have time for a knee-jerk reaction. When it hits, you feel the chronic pain, nausea, fatigue, confusion, among other things, that come on the following week. Then, you try to recover from that crap over the next several weeks. And you wonder where the time went.
But it's not too difficult to endure chemo, depending on your threshold for pain and discomfort, at least not the kind I've been getting for type IIIB lymphoma and adenocarcinoma of the upper GI. My hair doesn't fall out in clumps, though it falls out gradually like pine needles on a dying tree, and leaves the top of my head thinning. (Glad I'm not too concerned with vanity.) The pain is mostly from headaches and body aches, constipation, and vomiting. As much as I hate hypodermic needles, they're nothing in comparison. I'd have to say the extreme fatigue is the hardest to bear, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody else to experience what that feels like. You don't want to know directly, no matter how curious.
Chemo, with all its nasty side-effects, is still tolerable compared to radiation therapy. Let's just say, if the good doctor told me I'd have to do that again, I think I'd rather die. Yep, that's how bad radiation is. And next to treatment for esophageal cancer, treatment for my kind is supposed to be the most difficult to endure physically. But in terms of how it actually feels, it's no exaggeration that, towards the end of radiation, I felt half dead, very nearly dead.
Now, how can I explain how that feels? Wasting away. Exhausted every morning, every minute of every day. Almost no energy to raise a limb, and certainly no motivation to even lift a finger, quite literally. Moreover, not having a clue as to what's going on around me. It'a an invasion of body, mind, and soul. Feeling beaten down, bleeding out. No hyperbole here. I think it would be more humane to quickly put the poor animal out of its misery than to prolong the agony. Yep, that bad.
And yet, hope has a knack for returning once the lights come back on. Hard to believe, however, when you're in that moment of great despair. Nothing else matters, not even survival and self-preservation. You only want release. Welcome to the world of a cancer patient. You don't want to stay very long, if at all. It's like saying, "Welcome to hell. You won't enjoy your stay. Get out if you can." The only consolation is that you know it must be temporary and somewhat brief. And when you make it through this experience, you'll have a better handle on the other things that we call devastating-- because I know there are even more difficult and painful situations in life. Then there's Option B. To put a funny but pragmatic twist on the unavoidable, I'd like to paraphrase Louise C.K.: "When life gets overwhelming, don't worry. Remember, you're going to die. Or better yet, you can always kill yourself. Either way you're going to die." Yes, I know, dark but true.
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