Physically

I am fine. I didn’t have an allergic reaction to Taxol, despite the paranoia I had about my throat closing up in a bout of anaphylaxis. (I read about it happening to people, and having experienced my throat close up with the nut allergies, I was truly worried.) My sweet oncology nurses stayed with me safely for ten minutes at the first few Taxols to make sure I didn’t die. Shout out to oncology nurses for regularly talking me off of a ledge.

Treatment day is not as bad as it was on AC. Pat and Kristen were able to come to my first Taxol on March 6. Thank heavens they made the trip when they did because only five days later I was pulling my kids out of school for what looks to be the rest of the year thanks to Covid-19. Only Terry was able to come with me for the subsequent four Taxols and beginning this week I will have to go alone and I will have to finish alone. I have seven left which isn’t too bad. But now it’s been three months and it just feels like this is dragging on forever.

This week I will head to a new treatment center where there is a Paxman scalp cooling system installed. Since Terry won’t be able to come, he can’t continue to help me with my caps, so I had to completely change where I will get chemo in order to continue to save my hair. I honestly would almost give it up at this point, but it has been absolute hell capping for all the hours after each treatment and I don’t want all that misery to be for naught. Plus, I am just not a quitter. I began this thing and I’ll see it through.

With the Paxman system a nurse puts on the cap for me and it is a machine that plugs into the wall. I am relieved to be done with the cap changing every 25 minutes because it prevented me from fully enjoying my benny naps. (IV Benadryl is the best!) Don’t get me wrong, chemo alone is going to be incredibly depressing, but at least I’ll be able to sleep.

Switching to Paxman will end up being a heck of a lot more expensive, at a time when the economy is tanking and I won’t be able to meet with clients due to my non existent immune system for several months even after this is over, but what the heck. Cancer treatment is basically just lighting money on fire anyway.

My hair continues to slowly fall out and it’s just depressing knowing I still have two months of this in front of me. AC is the hardest chemo regimen on hair, and with the hair growth cycle being about three months, I will continue to lose hair until about three months after my last AC, which was February 21. Losing hair for months is just pure mental torture. The only reason I haven’t just broken down and shaved my head at this point is that I am hoping to feel more like myself more quickly when this is over. It would take me three or four YEARS to grow my hair back if I went totally bald. I just want to be able to move past this, and I won’t be able to until my hair is normal again.

My oncologist is happy with my response to chemo so far. In early March before I even started Taxol, I had a mammogram and ultrasound of where the tumor was and there is “no residual tumor” to be found on either. AC is not only hard on hair, it’s hard on cancer and it was hard on mine. This is great news, but I still have to finish all this chemo just in case the cancer threw off met cells into my blood or lymphatic system. The Taxol is supposed to kill any potential met cells remaining out there. Thirty percent of early stage breast cancers come back as stage four, or metastatic breast cancer, so I’m absolutely taking all the Taxol they’ll give me.

Mentally

Covid-19 has changed my treatment plan and somehow managed to make cancer even worse. I was supposed to get a bilateral mastectomy in June. Now that the state has put a ban on all elective surgeries it means that my surgeon can only take off the cancerous breast. So I will have to go back to have my other one removed and endure a second surgery and miserable recovery when the Covid-19 insanity lets up.

That’s right. Two surgeries. Two times being admitted to the hospital. Alone. Twice under general anesthesia. Two sets of months long surgical recoveries. I don’t even know if I will need follow up surgery on each side. It could be four. Cancer is the gift that keeps giving.

Learning this news threw me into a pretty terrible depression. I was honestly starting to see the light at the end of this bullshit tunnel until I heard this. I don’t know how the other side gets classified as “elective” but none of this was anything I elected and I’m absolutely not okay with any of it.

So mentally I am not good. I broke more dishes this week than we have broken in the entire almost twelve years of our marriage with this revelation. And while breaking plates is incredibly gratifying, it’s not going to remove and reconstruct my other breast.

It seems like this year was the perfect storm of hell designed especially to ruin my life in particular. It’s hard to watch everyone complain about the social or physical distancing when objectively what I am experiencing is undeniably worse.

But today is April 9. My cousin Marty would have turned 35 today. Instead, he died of a cancer and circumstances that were objectively and undeniably worse. I have no idea how he carried the particularly cruel burden of his medical fate, but I think of him often. His life and death put me on a course to extract the most of out my own life, and have us all repeating the mantra “Get Busy Living,” even these 15 years after we lost him. I am sure that over the years I left many friends and certainly my own spouse scratching their respective heads at the rapid and demanding rate at which I consume life, but I learned at a young age that nothing is guaranteed, especially the notion that I will live as long as I feel I deserve.

So while as an adult I know that I need to allow myself to feel the extent of my deep anxiety and depression, and I will remain open and honest about the mental health component of being a cancer patient, tomorrow I will get my shit together and head to chemo.