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...

My name is Laura and I watch the Real Housewives more regularly than I'd like to admit. I’m a vicarious visitor to Orange County and New York, used to spend a lot of time in New Jersey, and occasionally duck into Atlanta and Beverly Hills, just to see what’s going on. It is a bit of an addiction, the Housewives series. I was a latecomer to its explosively entertaining parties. I’d never been big on binge watching television and, honestly, it wasn’t until I began treatment for a breast cancer recurrence that I had the capacity and desire to collapse onto the couch and seek mindless diversion. It didn’t take me long to find the Bravo network, and it was almost impossible not to develop an affinity for their alternate version of female reality. Perpetual reruns of previous episodes got me quickly up to speed on the characters and their almost comically surreal and wacky hi-jinks. I also didn’t have the energy to find the remote and change the channel. For those who aren...

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 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...

When I began chemo five years ago, my oncologist told me that her goal was that I would get through treatment and say, "That wasn't as bad as I expected it to be." Chemotherapy is a systemic treatment meant to kill cancer cells, but it does not discriminate between cancer cells and other fast-growing cells, which is why it changes blood counts, disrupts hair and nail growth, and causes mouth sores.  My chemo regimen began with four rounds of dose-dense Adriamycin (also known as the “red devil” because of its coloring) and Cytoxan, administered at two week intervals. The Cytoxan was infused by IV, but the vial of Adriamycin was shot directly into a vein. Each infusion lasted about two hours. Adriamycin causes hair loss within two or three weeks of the first dose. My oncologist cautioned that hair loss was imminent, and like clockwork, the first tufts came out in my hand the day before my second dose. It was the strangest thing—one day my hair felt like hair, the nex...