Incompatible with Life

Brown hair, maybe blonde Blue eyes, like her sister Round cheeks, stubborn jaw A grin full of mischief The sum of our parts Put twice together In the daughter we know And the one lost forever

I love to run. Or I used to. In the past five years, body has gone from expressing mild resistance to running to flat out refusal. Injury, pain, and general malaise would be the three top descriptors of my post-cancer running career. I’d built my identity around my status as a runner and, even as my relationship with the sport soured, I held onto the hope that with enough time/training/nutrition/motivation my post-cancer body would return to pre-cancer performance. I had never been a run-every-day-to-keep-a-streak-going kind of runner, but I loved the endorphin high of a good run. I had never been fast, but I did track my distance, pace, and race times religiously, comparing current race pace to prior runs and rejoicing with each new personal record. I celebrated every incremental increase in mileage, owned more than my share of training magazines and manuals, and had at least one race-like event scheduled for almost every month of the year. I ran solo for stress relie...

My mother is a firm believer in rummage sales. Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to go on an annual purge of my toy collection, to cull the items that I’d held onto mostly out of the comfort of familiarity and send them off to a new home. I was an anxious child and this task always pushed me to my limits. I was never quite ready to let go and even the promise of jingling coins adding up in my piggy bank was not enough to loosen my grip on the long-forgotten and ignored items in my toy box. As I got older, though, I began to see the wisdom and beauty in it. When you release something that no longer works for you, you free yourself from the burden of unnecessary clutter, and bless someone else with your bounty. The older I got, the more easily I handed off unworn clothing, uncomfortable shoes, and outgrown home décor. This release did not extend to my relationships, however. I held on long past revelations of irreconcilable flaws of character, kept a firm grasp even i...

Though my oncologist was not thrilled with me quitting tamoxifen, she did give me her blessing. “Take a break and see how you feel. Just promise me that you’ll consider starting up again.” I stopped taking the pills and within a few weeks noticed an improvement in my energy level. My hot flashes were less frequent, weight management a bit easier. Running, my favorite leisure activity, stopped feeling like a chore. I couldn’t quite ratchet my pace back up to pre-cancer levels, but I could finally hold my own with my running buddies again. I harbored a small hope that stopping the medicine would put me back into my previous ovaries-still-in-action hormonal state of being. Sadly, aside from one scant period right after I abandoned the drug, my body stayed stubbornly stuck in menopause. My symptoms weren’t nearly as bad as they’d been on tamoxifen, but they were still there, mocking me. I started to have doubts about my decision. The drumbeat of, “What if?” reverberated in my ...

I’ve been cancer-free for five years now, but I am still technically in maintenance treatment courtesy of my daily dose of tamoxifen. Tamoxifen is a systemic (whole body) form of treatment that is meant to kill off any breast cancer cells by blocking their ability to take in estrogen. It’s a standard prescription for pre-menopausal women whose breast cancer was hormone-receptor positive. Typically taken for five years, tamoxifen brings with it a lengthy and daunting list of side effects. These range from serious—a heightened risk of uterine cancer and blood clots—to the minor and more common, which include weight gain, muscle/bone/joint pain, and hot flashes. The minor ones seem pretty benign when you first read them, as if they might be mildly inconvenient and innocuously unpleasant. As a total package they sound a lot like menopause, which is something that every woman eventually goes through, right? Except that tamoxifen treatment is like menopause on steroids, and thos...