On the cancer side, I am happy to report I have fingernails again! All the fingernails had totally fallen apart. Back when I was doing chemo—which finished in July, for goodness’ sake—every time I got a treatment, I got a big line like a tree ring across every finger and toenail. There were six treatments, and six lines across every nail. Eventually, all the nails just frayed and broke off at all those fault lines, and one of my big toenails went so far as to just fall off completely. The same kind of fast-growing cells that are responsible for growing hair are also in charge of producing fingernails. And the chemotherapy truly whacked them. But I am happy to say the nails are back to normal now. It’s nice to not have scraggly half-nails catching on everything. That only took six months!
First thing I did when the last scraggly fingernail went away was buy a guitar. And I am taking lessons and learning to play it. I could not die without learning how to play the guitar. I have tried a couple times before, in my youth, but I am already better at it now than I ever was, which I attribute to my teacher, Jeff. A few little cancer side-effects regarding playing the guitar, which I am not even going to try to explain to Jeff until I know him a lot better: 1)The temporary boob implant, or “tissue expander,” is hard as rock and gets in the way of the guitar. Awkward. 2) Sometimes I can’t see the strings on the guitar. More on this in a minute.
My hair is beginning to grow back, but it still looks pretty mangy. From the front, I am beginning to look less bald. But from the side or the back, you can see I still have a long way to go. However, the oncologist I saw yesterday says it will fill in; she says she has never seen a person whose hair stayed patchy like this, so that gives me hope.
They basically have me on a schedule now where one of my many doctors is looking at me every few weeks. This week, two more of my doctors checked me out, and all is basically well.
I finally went to my eye doctor. I had procrastinated on this one. I had to give in and actually do it when my glasses were broken in a freak accident (crushed by a large flying Bible, Revised Standard Version, which is the sort of thing you can’t make up, but I was afraid might be an omen).
Did you know that breast cancer can metastasize to the eye? Well, neither did I. Happily, I can report that mine has not. But the ophthalmologist checked it out in great detail. It turns out the vision problems I am having are the result of cancer drugs and old age, nothing worse. The eyes are very dry, and this may not get better. That sucks, but it doesn’t suck like going blind would suck, for example, especially when you are an artist. No sign of macular degeneration, which has plagued the women in my family, or glaucoma. I do need new glasses. When they get here, I should be able to see the guitar strings again. The diagnosis is presbyopia, or “old person’s eyes.”
And yesterday I went to check in with my radiation oncologist, Dr. Croog. I can say she seemed absolutely delighted with my progress. “This is a good outcome,” she said, and she was visibly happy.
She complimented me on my flexibility and range of motion of my right arm and so forth. I told her my trainer and I have been working very hard on these things. I now have dumbbells scattered around my living room, among the skateboard parts and lacrosse pads and hockey sticks and such. The dumbbells, unlike the rest of the crap, are mine, and I actually use them, and it’s truly nice to have an authority figure validate my efforts in that area. I still have a love/hate relationship with my trainer. When she had to go out of town for a family emergency, her substitute trainer actually took me back to the free-weight man cave at our gym, where I had never dared to venture before. I can report that I can now do modified push-ups. Me! Who has never done a push-up before, ever, and who has a messed-up arm! So these trainers must know something. I learned in the free-weight room that I have to remember to breathe and also not laugh or spook when the Sumo dude next to me dramatically drops a large stack of weights, or emits a loud wounded-elk noise. It’s that whole mental-discipline thing.
It generally feels like my whole breast-cancer experience is gradually changing. It is less about the physical problems, which are steadily fading, to the emotional and spiritual ones, which still come and go.
I’ve had several interesting responses to my questioning the appropriateness of military language and battle metaphors. People aren’t putting their comments on my blog, but they are emailing me, which is great. I am still thinking about some of the things you all are telling me, and I will probably have more to say on this sometime soon. I think the consensus is, I am wrong, and that battle imagery is utterly appropriate. More on that another time. But one thing a friend of mine’s husband said that resonates with me: a large part of military life is waiting around and boredom, in between bouts of mortal combat, and cancer is like that, too. This rings very true to me.
Another topic that has come up this week: how much do cancer patients want to hear about other people’s cancer problems? A friend of mine told me on Sunday that his mom has been recently diagnosed with breast cancer, in a fairly advanced form, it sounds. But he was afraid I didn’t want to hear about it, that I had enough cancer in my life already.I am sure every person with cancer would answer that one differently. For me, yes, I totally want to hear about it.
For one thing, the way people gathered around me when I got sick was amazing and probably helped save my life. And several of you, and you know who you are, are cancer survivors yourselves. So if I can possibly pay that forward by helping someone else who is doing this, I want to help, at least to pray for that person.
But at a deeper level, I think, once you’ve got cancer, you are sort of “on the team” whether you like it or not. Yes, it always makes you sad or angry or whatever when you learn that a friend, or his mom, has got cancer, too. And if, God forbid, someone dies of it, it messes you up for a while, sure.
Why, up on Rt. 97 near I-70, you pass a little church graveyard where one of the graves right next to the road belongs to someone who died of breast cancer. It was someone who was loved, because there are always flowers there, and from time to time there are big pink-ribbon bouquets there, as well. I used to dread driving past it. I would see her pink-ribbon bouquets and my chest would seize up and I wouldn’t be able to breathe for a minute. I have a little too much empathy, sometimes, or a little too much unhealthy imagination. “That’s me in two years’ time,” I would think. Fortunately, over the last several months, those kinds of thoughts have subsided.
Now, these days, I am just as likely to grab on to the good news and successes of other breast cancer patients, as I am to the bad. For example, last night I saw a show with a friend who recently had a double mastectomy. She had surgical complications and was in the hospital a long time. But she pulled through, and now she is fine. She looks GREAT. She’s got this. And as much as that nameless woman in the graveyard on Rt. 97 scared me, this friend gives me great hope. This is doable, her life says to me, and here is exactly how you do it.
What I told my friend whose mom has breast cancer is, it’s like, whether or not you want to be there, you are now part of a big army. There’s that military language again! Can’t escape it! Whenever one of your fellow soldiers goes down, you take it personally, and it messes you up. But whenever one does well, it’s really, deeply, satisfying. And you don’t really get a choice in whether or not you are participating, anyway; it’s your cross to bear, from now on. So you go for it.
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