Incompatible with Life

Race for the Cure 2010, one month post-chemo. Yesterday marked six years from the day that I received the call telling me that the pathology report from my surgery four days earlier was in, and confirmed that I had cancer…for the second time. It was late in the day, as afternoon gave way to evening, its subtle waning light foreshadowing sunset. I remember marveling at the idea that my surgeon was still at work, reviewing reports and delivering verdicts, at such an hour.  It was spring break for me. I'd scheduled the surgery on the Monday after Easter so that I wouldn't have to take time off for it and, when the call came, I had just returned home from a run which, in hindsight, was either evidence of extremely poor judgment or the strength of my ability to ignore and deny the facts. I sat on the porch, cordless phone to my ear, furiously scribbling notes as I absorbed the news. It didn’t pack the same shock value as the first time I’d received this diagnosis, m...

I’ve been nursing a lingering cough since before Christmas. At first I didn’t think too much of it. I’d caught the upper respiratory virus that circulated through my kindergarten classroom, but after suffering through a few feverish nights and a week of congestion, all that remained was a mild residual cough. It stayed with me through the holidays. By mid-January my patience was waning. Any attempt at physical exertion left me winded, which hampered my daily exercise habit, which increased my stress level, which made me reach for comfort food...you get the picture. I found myself shivering in the evenings, unable to get warm enough, which was unusual for my hot-flashy self. Yes it was colder than normal outside, but I was chilled to the bone. Until I went to bed, at which point I started sweating like Frosty in a greenhouse. My frustration came to a head last weekend. Tired of being tired and sick, I dragged myself to Urgent Care. The doctor thought my lungs sounded clear,...

Now that the thirty-one days of Pinktober have passed, I feel safe enough to vent a bit of frustration with the whole breast cancer awareness movement.  Don’t get me wrong—I recognize that fund-raising is a necessary underpinning of medical research, and I appreciate societal commitments to eradicating disease. It’s just that I’m not sure there’s anyone in America who is unaware of breast cancer, and it seems that more and more companies are skipping the altruism part and going pink strictly for profit. Despite the tidal wave of pinktastic merchandise that floods October to amp up awareness, breast cancer continues to be diagnosed and, more disturbingly, to claim lives.  Current research suggests that the emphasis on early detection has backfired, leading many women through unnecessary treatments for cancers that were never going to become invasive. However, the body of medicine remains confounded on how to predict and prevent metastatic breast...

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...

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...

You say you know A lifetime ago (And smugly, too) I thought I knew A million dry runs in   Technicolor daydreams Yet unprepared Caught unaware I hurtled from the track In far-flung frenzy Broken, groping Faintly hoping But, oh! The dark I emerged Alive (not fully) Whole (not really) Shattered, scattered Dead and buried in The new normal You issue demands Always needier, ever greedier And stare through the obvious With reckless oblivion Don’t tell me that you know— You don’t. Can’t? Won’t. Incompatible with Life: A story of hope

I never appreciated my hair. Dirt brown in color, it was thick, but fine—straight, but it frizzed in humidity.  I spent most of my adolescence trying to beat it into submission through overly regular home perms and the occasional shearing to remove the resulting damage. Added to my misery was the fact that I was woefully inept at styling. Curling irons, flat irons, hot rollers—none of them worked in my hands. Insertion of a ponytail holder was really the only option I’d mastered. I wavered between short and shoulder length for much of my early adulthood, growing it out only to cut it all off again. I was a regular in the hair coloring aisle and—for a brief period of poor investments just prior to marriage—in the chair of a high-end salon to maintain the burnt sienna shade I’d come to favor. I decided in my thirties that highlights and layers would be the best way to add movement and interest to my limp locks. This bold move resulted ever-lightening brassy streaks that ...

I prayed for patience and my prayer was answered—in the form of a cancer diagnosis. Cancer demands patience. More patience than you knew you had, more than you knew you were even capable of. Every trip to the doctor’s office—and there’s rarely just one practitioner that you see—requires that you wait your turn for an interval ranging from minutes to hours, depending upon how busy the doctor happens to be that day and the level of complication of the case that walks in the door just ahead of you. Cancer offers you endless tests, each of which has its own incubation period for rendering results. You wait with bated breath for each call, wondering if it will clear you or further seal your fate. Chemotherapy ties you down in a most literal way, tethering you to an IV as you wait for an excruciatingly slow drip, drip, drip to be done, done, done; counting up or down, depending upon where you are in your quest to complete the magic number of cycles that your oncologist has p...

“Everything happens for a reason.” It’s one of the most common rote responses we have when we hear of someone else’s tragedy. I’ve been on the receiving end of this comment more times than I care to count…and I hate it. Seriously, I’d love to see it eradicated from the English language. When people tell me that there’s a reason I got cancer, it implies that there’s a reason why they didn’t. When they tell me that there’s a reason I lost my baby, the unspoken message is—well, you know. Those words, strung together in an overture of sympathy, provide comfort only to the person speaking them. They represent a very convenient and human reaction to tragedy—seeking meaning in a way that enables us to distance ourselves from the possibility that such a thing could happen to us. Interestingly, I’ve never heard this phrase uttered by a parent who’s buried a child, or a widow who lost her beloved spouse. I’ve never heard someone with a life-threatening medical condition suggest ...