It's day three of round five and I feel like Mr. Stay Puft. Not visibly swollen or otherwise marshmallow-like, but I imagine my limbs being injected by a bicycle pump and my face and mouth stung by a swarm of bees. Walking home from Stella's school I felt 100 years old and was cursing the gaggle of spandexed mommies gaining on me from behind, ready to do their daily bootcamp class. Will take this any day over nausea though.
Other than these gems of side effects and dreaming of hanging Chinese lanterns in doorways all night, post-chemo this time is manageable. My tongue is burnt, my IV hand is still big and blue, but I can take smells and eat breakfast. Was even reading my cancer lit over the weekend, getting ever closer to figuring out what to eat and what not to eat - zeroing in particularly on the estrogen-laden sources of food and sundry all around us.
Read an article in the Globe about post-menopausal hormone therapy and how it's been all but confirmed that pumping extra estrogen into a girl's bod after menses does not do a body good. If 70% of breast cancers are estrogen-receptive, and so many of us have some bad cells kickin' around our fun bags, why mess around there when we don't have to?
I try to think of myself B.C. and how I knew I was tempting fate by being on birth control pills for 20 years, ignoring the paraben labels for too long, and ingesting a host of other estrogens/carcinogens because nothing was immediate. Nothing is ever directly linked. Nothing is 100% confirmed, so let me live and work it all out while trying my best to be better at everything. I'm the first to trumpet that we're all responsible for what goes into our bodies and for sifting through the garbage that comes at us in terms of what's shit and what's not shit to put in there, but how much did I just expect to have my body sort it all out somehow and deal me the cancer card when I was old and ready?
It continues to confound me every time I go to the BCCA and I see patients who are so obese they're immobile, smoking like a chimney outside the building and then cramming back the bags of doughnuts in the waiting room just to get hooked up to an IV to kill the good with the bad. To let someone and something else take care of the problem. Listen, I know I'm a judgy bitch, but mamma mia. Here's me worrying about the percentage of lavender oil in my deodorant.
So I sort things out, teeter on that edge of what will be right for me, what will keep me living to 100, what will let me continue to eat with friends, and what will help me get through the next 10 years of dinners with my kids without making everyone curse my wheatgrass smoothies.
And all I want right now is an ice cream sundae with hot fudge and salty peanuts.
Sometimes I think that women are often left with deciding for themselves what is the "worse case scenario" for their bodies. If you don't take hormone therapy then you will have to get used being a sweaty, crabby bitch that no one wants to be around (including your boss, co workers and/or your partner). When warned about the possible side effects we shrug and say if this is my only choice I guess I'll go for the therapy - Mary is using it and she seems happy and healthy - so there you go! Damned if you do and damned if you don't!
ReplyDeleteDang, I knew there something I was going to pick up on way back from work, part deux.
ReplyDeleteYou've been craving the good badness of a Peanut Buster Parfait all these days and I haven't come thru...what kinda husband am I?
It's obvious I'm the kind of guy who encourages bad behaviour, and always ready to embrace the 7th deadly sin, so my solemn vow is to bring home the badness (and maybe a little bit o'something for m'self).