2008 March « Anne SG and the Big C

Sticks and Stones

March 21, 2008 at 8:42 am | In breast cancer | 1 Comment

I’ve always hated that old saying-”sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurts me.” Of course, I suppose it’s meant to be a defense against bullying, but let’s face it, we all remember the teasing we got as children, though broken arms and such are long since healed. Words are incredibly powerful. I am all about words. I love books not just for the stories they tell, but the words used to tell them. I wish I could eat books–I would devour them, savor them, gobble them and chew contendedly on articles, pronouns, and especially the adjectives. I would choose books that use the best words–the ones that both read and speak in such a way that they seem perfect–like subtle and facade and heinous. I would snack on adverbs, dessert on onomatopoeias.

Now, of course I say that because words are my life. I have always been fascinated with words–the way words can be similar to each other but there’s always one that’s just right. I annoy my students to pieces with my little “wc” (word choice) in the margins of their papers, urging them to find a more precise word, the exact right word that they mean.

Recently a friend at work asked my why I have a dictionary propped open next to my computer. He pointed out that I can certainly go to dictionary.com or m-w.com faster than I can thumb through the book. He’s right of course, and I knew it. I hadn’t thought about it–I actually use the online sources and not the book itself. I suppose it’s a comfort to me. Just because one can look up Scripture online, one doesn’t throw out one’s Bible, does one?

Which brings me to words I’ve been thinking on lately. People always talk about cancer as a fight. It’s a battle (“Jane lost her battle with cancer”), a way we wage war against out own bodies and the cells that are destroying us. I suffered a miscarriage and that seemed, at the time, the exact word. There was no battle to be done, no choice to be made–it was done to me, to my baby. Yet the flu is something I catch, like a pop fly or a guitar pick at a concert. But cancer? That doesn’t seem like a fight to me–I feel more like I am enduring cancer, living with cancer or even in spite of it (how I love that “in spite”–I am taunting my cancer, surviving even though the treatment makes me suffer so).

Then I went to my trusty online sources (the OED–Oxford English Dictionary–is the very best, of course, but you can’t really use it online without an account and I can’t afford the real thing) and looked up fight–and though the first two definitions put me off, the third struck me: “to struggle to endure or surmount.” Ahhhh. Yes. It is the right word, after all.

Playing the Cancer Card

March 16, 2008 at 7:38 pm | In breast cancer, cancer, health | Leave a Comment

When, I wonder, would it be okay to play the old cancer card? Mostly I try not to–I really want to just keep on going without asking for special help. But I have to admit, there are time I really want to play that card. Oh, sure, I can’t see myself getting stopped by a cop: “oh, sorry, I was going 85 because I have cancer.” Or to the kids’ school: “yeah, about them showing up on time. In uniform. Or at all. See, I have cancer.” Or even my work: “yeah, about those classes I was supposed to take over. Um, I have cancer.”

But the thing is, I am so utterly tapped out doing the very little I do these days. It’s all I can do to get out of bed and get the kids to school with my hair on straight….or at all…literally…I feel so pathetic, and really want to be normal. But cancer is kicking my butt!The second round of chemo was just as bad as the first; the anti-nausea meds they gave me this time were much better but still…I can’t sleep at night (steroids?), and the nausea is still there–it’s just not vomiting, its creeping on the periphery of me like Eeyore’s rain cloud. I have learned that I’m going to need a good 5-6 days to feel semi-normal; by about the time for the next treatment, I’m feeling pretty okay. Then it starts again.

Part of me feels weak and inefficient for not being able to do very much. Part of me feels justified–after all, I do have cancer. I can’t say how many times I wish I were not single-parenting it while my husband works out of state–I just want to be like a southern literary heroine and “take to my bed.” I can almost hear it Arden telling her friends with one of her huge dramatic sighs: “mama took to her bed again.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? To just crawl under the covers and cover my eyes with a cool washcloth and let someone else take over? But I think I’m going to owe my kids a couple years of therapy as it is for having to watch me go through this. I don’t want to ruin their entire adulthoods by abandoning them to self-pity and melodrama.

As delicious as it sounds.

Two words

March 14, 2008 at 3:04 pm | In breast cancer, cancer, health | 1 Comment

Chemo sucks.

“Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses” Caleb Carr

March 9, 2008 at 6:55 pm | In breast cancer, cancer, health | 1 Comment

My hair is gone. Remember that last post about me being so nonchalant about my appearance? HA!!! Last week my hair started falling out. Then it really started coming out–combing it meant huge chunks would come out. So, Wednesday, I had to deal with it.Thank God for friends. A couple of folks went to the wig store with me (Good Hair Days in Oldsmar, FL); a herd of kids came along. I found something that I liked ok, but not nearly as much as my own hair. Then, my hair stylist friend came to my house with her clippers and shaved the remaining hair off. I cried. She told me it was okay, so I did. She cried. I felt self indulgent (there are starving children in Africa…and everywhere else!) but I also felt–and feel–awful. I am terribly self-conscious, and just do not want attention drawn to me.I’d hoped to be brave like another mom at the school who has just completed treatment for uterine cancer. She has been such a great example for me–she is always upbeat and offering her help and prayers and support. She wears her hairless head proudly. I so wanted to be like her. I could say that it’s because I look much uglier with my dark patches of stubble, but that’s only part of it. I don’t want anyone looking at me–I want to skulk about unnoticed and not have to explain. The wig is itchy. I ordered some hats too. I don’t know if I have the courage to go out uncovered–we’ll see. But my kids, though they hated the wig and the baldness at first, have adapted and don’t seem to care a bit. Thank goodness, because I am having a hard enough time dealing on my own, I really don’t know if I could make someone else feel okay with me, too!Tomorrow (Monday) is chemo round 2. Wish me luck.

“Cancer doesn’t just assault our bodies. It attacks our view of the world and our place in it. Random bad things do happen, and they happen to us. To our families. To our friends.” Larry Siever

March 2, 2008 at 1:03 pm | In breast cancer, cancer, health | 1 Comment

This is my paternal grandmother, who suffered, and eventually died from, breast cancer. I think I am getting a bit of an idea how devastating this disease must have been to her psychologically.

My grandmother was known for her looks. She was, before she married and settled back in my hometown, a model in New York. I am sure much of her identity was built upon her incredible beauty. This is not something I ever identified with. Now, I am not saying this to berate my own looks, but simply to say that my identity was never about how I look–it was about how I think. I am sure that my grandmother suffered the radical transformation of her body deeply. That has not been all that difficult for me. I don’t look at my scars and feel nothing; I have absolutely had a lot to deal with in that regard. But losing my breasts was a relatively easy decision when it came to saving my life. I opted for losing both. It was just a no-brainer.

But the problems I’m having cognitively are a whole other matter. Just now I had to really struggle with that last sentence, searching for the right word. I am having a really hard time remembering things, finding words, keeping a general sense of order in my mind. I first started noticing this over the past year or so; but since the chemo it’s been very bad. I was ignoring it until my mother in law tried to tactfully bring it up. At first I was in denial, but when I looked it up, I found the term “chemo brain.“

Now I think I get how my grandmother must have felt. All my life, from the first time my parents told me I was not living up to my academic potential (probably 4th grade?), I have pretty much based my identity on my brain. Looks were really irrelevant. My grandmother was certainly intelligent, but I suppose her beauty and her role as a good southern woman came first. Thus, breast cancer (I whispered that) surely devastated her identity.

I don’t know if “chemo brain” is truly from chemo, exacerbated by chemo, or a by product of the hormones that were feeding my cancer, or what. But it’s been extremely difficult lately, because I’ve been trying to get it together enough to get back to work. I want to spend at least a few days a week there, teaching again and writing and working on something other than being a patient. But I can’t remember to make phone calls, or even find a word I’m looking for in my mind–how can I teach, or write? My very life has been about words. Now I’m losing my words. It’s terrifying.