Wedding Crash

As dark as the majority of my posts have been lately, this won’t be one of them.  I think we only have a handful of truly perfect days allotted to us in our lifetime and I got to have three of them this past weekend.  I spent the weekend living.  Even the parts of my weekend that didn’t go as planned were important to me because I spent them with the people I care about, doing things I love.

As a bit of backstory, I finally reclaimed my dog from Jac and Richard because (believe it or not) they didn’t want to take a dog that wasn’t theirs to the beach.  Shocking, I know.  So Buca came home and he likes our apartment and my roommate, but he was only there for one night before I had to take him to the doggie hotel for the weekend, as Noelle was working two 12-hour nursing shifts.  I was having total Mom-guilt when I dropped him off and he looked so betrayed with those eyes and his tail tucked under.   He’d been abandoned by Jaclyn and his favorite person Richard, and now I was leaving him with strangers. 

Friday’s road trip was fairly uneventful until Mom needed me to look up directions to our hotel.  We were about 15 minutes away from Raleigh, where Mom assured me everything was, so imagine my surprise when I found out our hotel and the wedding was in Chapel Hill, which we’d passed about 20 minutes ago.  Le sigh.  We finally get to where we need to be, and I had time to get my first post-cancer haircut!!!!!!  It was such a little thing, but it made me feel so feminine.  The chemo and radiation have caused a bad superhero reaction in my body and now I’m growing sideburns and neck hair like I’m Teen Wolf or something. 

Well-groomed, I went to the post-rehearsal dinner where I got to be surrounded by family.  I adore all of my family but the immediate highlight was getting to meet Kaylie and Mike’s new baby, Carolina.  Babies are precious.  Especially when they’re sleeping…  The party was fantastic and the after-party was even better.  I met some of the Polonsky cousins, including Courtney and we bonded over being cancer survivors and generally awesome people.  There were also a disproportionate amount of attractive fellows there, so that didn’t suck.

Kim and Joey’s wedding was incredible.  All of the superficial details like the weather and the decorations were awesome, but to see two people who have been together for so long and who are just so obviously right for each other commit their lives and love to each other… To be a part of that was an honor.  Working in family law (and not even as someone who directly deals with clients) can be so draining and disheartening.  Watching two people who you know are supposed to be together just reaffirms that some things in the world turn out right. 

And not to make the day about me, but watching them reminded me of one of the many things I have to live for.  There have been so many times this year where I feel like I’m just coping and existing, trying to work up the courage to take my life back.   Seeing Kim and Joey and being at event where people were celebrating life, not just living it, made realize how important it is that I continue to find my direction and be a part of life rather than live on the fringes of it.

The reception was amazing and crazy.  Most people who know me and know my aversion to dancing (except for show tunes in the privacy of my own home) would not have recognized me on Saturday.  The party was one of those kick-off-your-shoes kind of things and I did.  After about an hour, I realized my whole dancing philosophy was simply doing The Twist at different tempos, while occasionally throwing in a Jersey Shore fist pump for variety.  CuteBoy, who’d I’d been making eyes at all weekend, did dance with me at one point, which was more than nice, but I was so flustered, it was like the first time Patrick Swayze danced with Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing.  I just looked awkward.  I don’t remember being this bad at flirting, so I’m going to blame it on the chemo.

And to bring the weekend full circle, my roommate picked up my dog for me on Sunday, so I got to come home to 100 pounds of wiggly, tail-wagging and sloppy kisses.  Best greeting ever.

I couldn’t live at that level of frenzy and excitement every day, but remembering what it’s like to feel truly well is something I can do.  Laughing, staying up too late, dancing, talking too much, eating too much, being silly with little kids (and catching their colds), road-tripping…  I didn’t know how much I needed all this.

Good News for a Change

If you want to change your outer life, you must change your inner life first. –GabrielleBernstein

It doesn’t feel real, so I’m a little afraid to say it out loud in the Internet sense.  But the word is in from my oncologist: yes, there are still scans to do, potential radiation side effects, and the real possibility of relapse.  But right now? 

I’m in remission.

Holy crap.

Just like when I was diagnosed, the idea of remission doesn’t feel real.  It hasn’t hit me yet and so I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or do my Snoopy-like happy dance or some combination of the above.  And just like when I finished radiation, I get to celebrate this milestone at a family wedding—my cousin Joey and his beloved Kim, this Saturday in Raleigh.  What better way to have good news than to enjoy it with people you love and who love you?

It would be way too easy to sweep this under the rug and worry about the dark side of what this means.  I feel like when I was sick, I didn’t have anywhere farther to fall, so more bad news didn’t really bother me that much.  Now something good has happened, and I’ll have something to lose, a good place to fall down from. 

Just for this weekend, though, I’m going to put worry out of my mind.  I’m going to enjoy my car ride through the mountains, buy some cider or other kitschy tourist items, enjoy a wedding with the Minicks and my mother, and be grateful that I have friends who care when I get good news like this.

Self-Loathe, Self-Love

It would be so easy to blame the cancer.  Part of me wants to.  I want to blame the disease for making me unhappy, but the truth is I was unhappy long before I got cancer.  Believe it or not, cancer was the best thing that could have happened to me because I needed something to shake me out of my self-loathing.  I spent years feeling not good enough for everyone; boyfriends, family, smarter-than-me friends... Cancer at least made me realize I had a life I wanted to fight to save.

Since doctors cleared me to drink again, I’ve been behaving like a person I don’t recognize.  More importantly, I’ve been behaving like a person I wouldn’t like.  Post-cancer Drunk Me is not a nice person, nor is she a sane person.  Every fear I’ve had since getting cancer is amplified by a million and I behave (or not) like someone who is a raging nutjob.  After a couple of times freshman year of college, I was never a black-out drinker.  And now, due to some force, I am.  My tolerance is obviously lower, as one would expect, but my behavior is complete crazy pants.

That being said, I don’t like the person I am when I drink which is why I’m taking a drinking sabbatical.  It’s easy to say it’s the chemo or the medication or whatever that’s making me behave this way, but truthfully, my behavior is that of a person who hasn’t dealt with all her issues.  Issues that have nothing to do with cancer, issues that have everything to do with cancer…  I’ve spent the last two years feeling like a burden to everyone I know for one reason or another, and I’ll be damned to add another reason to that list.

My behavior is hurting the people around me.  It’s causing unnecessary stress and burdening them which in turn is adding to my stress which makes me drink more… It’s a vicious cycle I tell you.  Last night, I hurt two people I care about deeply and I don’t even remember doing it.  It rightfully scares me because that’s not the person I was raised to be and I hope it’s not the person I am.

How should I feel about airing so much of myself on a blog?  I don’t know.  I don’t have the answers.  But I’m telling you because I need people to hold me accountable and remind me of this moment.  I need to remember the day where I made a choice, and that choice is to live.    I’ve had such a hard time admitting how scared I am that I’m going die, but there’s no point in living if I don’t live the best life possible.  Drunk Me is not the best possible life.  I thought I had a handle on it, but obviously I don’t.  I just know this isn't the life I fought so hard to save.

The "After" Life

I touched a bit on what life is like since finishing treatment but I spent most of it focusing on how one begins to bounce back from depression.  For the record, I’m still trying to figure that out.  But in effort to not let a reasonably decent pun (as seen in my title) go to waste, I wanted share what the day-to-day living looks like when one has cancer.

I feel like I’ve mentioned the ex who had cancer.  If not, the story pretty much goes: when he was 18, my most recent ex had the same type of cancer I have (though it may not have been the same subset).  Anyway, when I first met him, I just thought he was playing the Byron-esque brooding tragedy as girl-nip.  (Obviously, in my case, it was working.)  But just coming out of my suburban bubble, and into my college bubble, I’d had very little experience with tragedy and life-changing events at that point.  I just figured the love of a good woman and few lite rock love songs could charm him out of his funk; cue the sunset and happily ever after.

But, what he couldn’t really verbalize in a way I got, and what I’m only finally now understanding, is that even if you become a cancer survivor, a part of you still dies anyway.  In a serious, five-stages-of-grief kind of way.  You can (and should) go back to living your normal life, but you will never fit into it exactly the same way again.  Your perspective on everything changes.

One of the biggest things I’m sure I’ve mentioned is my feeling of security.  I no longer get tickles in my throat and back pains from sleeping poorly.  I assume any of these signs are indicators my tumor is metastasizing and I need to get a CT scan immediately.  This fear would cripple me on a daily basis if I allowed it to.  Instead, I use the excellent, time-tested Puritan methods of denial and repression.  For the record, this is not a long-term solution to any problem, but right now I’m in a fake-it-til-I-make-it place with my recovery, and it gets me out the door.

In a more humorous setting, after not drinking for nine months, and drinking very little two months before that, you can imagine my alcohol tolerance is non-existent.  What would have been considered “hydrating” in college turns me into a crazy crying wreck now.  I’m still working on figuring out what my limits are with sometimes humiliating/entertaining results.  Like the story of seeing my ex at the baseball game… Luckily we’ve know each other for nine years, so this isn’t the first time he’s seen me like that, but embarrassing none the less.  Especially with my work friends around.  On the upside, I haven’t been drinking nearly as much as I was pre-diagnosis, which was getting seriously unhealthy, and I have no desire to go back to that person anyway.

Truthfully, I’m not doing anything great with my life post-cancer so far, probably because until December, it’s not really going to feel like I’m post-cancer.  I should probably feel more guilty that I’m not helping children or the homeless or whomever, but I don’t have a handle on my life yet.  I do know that my career calling is going to be in some combination of writing and public service (I hope).  I’m currently job hunting around some non-profits and opportunities that would allow me to use my writing/journalism/PR/education background in some ways.  Life’s just way too short to be just making a living.  I’m trying to be more careful about my health.  I currently meet with a very scary trainer for bootcamp twice a week.  The classes are amazing and I feel awesome, but permanently crippled.

Really, I just care about being someone my friends and family are proud of and not letting my cancer define me.  Easier said than done, obviously, but…  I don’t know.  I don’t have the answers.  Instead, I just throw my thoughts out into the Cloud, hoping to make sense out of them and hoping they resonate with other people. 

I'm Not Dead Yet...

I disappeared for awhile.  I’m entitled.  Excuse the language, Mom and Dad, but depression is a bitch.  I never truly understood what depression was until it attacked me sometime between my third and fourth rounds of chemo.  I walked around Mom’s house crying, daily.  I didn’t believe I’d get well, and more to the point, I wasn’t sure I was worthy of being healed.  Even if I did go into remission, I’d turned into such damaged goods, who’d want to take me on?  What was I doing with my life that made me worthy to be healed?  Thankfully, I wear my heart on my sleeve, and my oncologist could see how unhappy I was. (Crying in the middle of an appointment might have been a tip-off.)  Her compassion and lack of judgment made it easier to explain how badly I needed help.  And I found a cancer survival group geared towards young adults.  I found a shrink.  Chemicals helped alter my personality into depression; I now take an anti-depressant to recalibrate.

I suppose I should feel more ashamed of all these medical issues.  But I have enough narcissism and altruism to think people need to hear what I have to say.  Not necessarily because I’m the one who’s having them, but because I can’t be the only one who’s having them.  I created this blog as a way for people to realize they weren’t alone.  Infertility issues, mental health issues, cancer issues, face-mortality-at-a-young-age issues—I wanted people to know they weren’t alone.  But there are days I worry this kind of honesty is going to come back and bite me.  At the risk of sounding shallow, how am I going to attract a man when I come with what must be the human equivalent of a Carfax report that says “Rachel Boyd is a lemon”?

In spite of all this, I begin to have tenuous steps towards remission.   You guys missed my story of radiation.  Twenty-eightish days of basically being microwaved while being strapped down to a table while wearing a plastic mask that promotes claustrophobia… The stuff fetish magazines are made of.  But I celebrated my last radiation treatment by going to the DC/Virginia area for a much-needed visit to one of my bff’s, Liz, and her newish boyfriend (whom I got to give the Friend Judgment to) and a beloved cousin’s wedding.  In all honesty, my health and energy levels would have been better served by staying home and watching Good Eats and One Tree Hill.  But seeing my friends and my family was my reward and my treat.  Liz and the Minicks had been so supportive from Minute One of my diagnosis that I wanted them to see their prayers didn’t go unanswered.

And now I begin healing.  I’m back at work daily, though often interrupted for doctors’ appointments.  I finally moved in with my long-suffering roommate.  I’m meeting people: nice girls my own age to make friends with, cute boys.  I’m baby-sitting again.  I got to sing “The Wheels on the Bus” with my favorite charge, complete with hand motions.  It was the healthiest I’d felt in months.  The gods’ honest truth is I have a good chance to beat cancer.  But my age and gender and the severity of my particular cancer mean there’s also a very good chance I’ll relapse.  If don’t relapse, side effects from the radiation like breast or lung cancer might get me. 

I might also die of a stroke, hit by a car, or poisoned in a trendy restaurant.  If I don’t enjoy living a bit more, what was the point of getting well in the first place?

Heads Will Roll

So fifth round of chemo is done.  It was not quite successful.  They sent me home without giving me part of my chemo.  As you can imagine (for those of you who've met him), Dad was furious.  Mom was angry b/c she got really silent when the hospital called and told us.  I'm irritated.  I'm working up to angry.  It's just frustrating, and it's not an easy b/c they've already given me the post-treatment shot and to give me the chemo now could reactivate my tumor.  I believe the medical term for this situation is "hot mess."

I saw the doctor today for the usual round of  bloodwork.  Everything is good on that front except for my counts being a little low, which is normal at this stage of chemo.  I'm having really fun joint pains that are normal as well.  At the doctor today, they also told me to spend more time with my friends.  And I agree.  I miss all of my friends, but most of them have legitimate jobs (or semi-legitimate) and they aren't available til evening when I'm tired.  I shall try to make an effort though.  At least there's skeeball starting up again...

No funny stories.  Just the general shocking of old ladies with my shaved head.  Little pleasures, right?

Hats and Head Scarves

Obviously I’ve been MIA from the blogosphere.  This last round of chemo really knocked me down after they upped my dosage, so I’ve been a mental zombie.  However, I’m finally coming out of the fog just in time for my next round of chemo beginning May 2.  Awesome timing. 

Being laid up gives me lots of time to think and my new favorite topic of thought is getting my PhD.  However, the topic of my doctoral thesis is stumping me.  I know I’d like to combine pop culture and education with a twist of women’s studies, but that’s not quite specific enough to make a many-page thesis. 

Mainly I get a big kick out of the idea of handing out business cards that say “Dr. Boyd.”  I feel like the family slacker with only my master’s when I look at people like my dad or cousin Jake with their J.D.s.  It’d be nice to be the first doctor in the family, even if I wouldn’t be the fun kind with the prescription pad.

I also had an adventure at the grocery store the other day.  By “adventure,” I mean “mildly funny story.”  We needed milk and my chemo sweet tooth was demanding some sort of gummy fruit snack, so off to the Whole Foods I go. 

Being in the depths of chemo side effects and feeling just miserable, I gave little thought to my appearance.  (Besides, the hipsters who shop at my particular Whole Foods aren’t really my type.)  So I’m in the candy when a long-haired stranger comes up to me and begins a conversation.

Stranger: Pardon me, and forgive me if I’m completely off base, but are you a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community?
Me: (long pause) No… I just have cancer.
Stranger: (awkward silence) Oh.  What stage are you in?
Me: Stage 2 Lymphoma.
Stranger: Well, I hope your treatment goes well.  (World’s most awkward hug.) Good luck to you.  (Runs off to frozen foods.

I suppose my outfit of straw hat, gray t-shirt, jeans, and a pedicure did suggest a certain amount of sexual ambiguity.

On the upside, I have a title for my memoirs: Fedora Says “Lesbian,” Head Scarf Says “Cancer.”