It's my first back-to-real-life Monday. It's the first alternating Monday since February 6th that I'm not cabled to an infusion bag with my ass glued in a plastic recliner. I'm not going to stumble home tonight feeling like I was roofied by Brock Turner disguised as a middle-aged nurse. I'm not going to wake up tomorrow feeling like I need a nap. Goodbye, metallic cottonmouth! Goodbye, vermillion pee! Goodbye, menopausal hot flashes! Most importantly, goodbye, dangly robot arm tube! (I credit my 2nd graders with that apropos renaming of my PICC-line.)
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| No more tube demons living in my arm. |
Today feels worth celebrating.
I deserved a celebration two weeks ago on my last day of chemo, but my doc's surprise recommendation of radiation treatment sucked the life out of my party. To be more precise, it sucked the life out of me. To be most precise, I wanted to hurl myself off a bridge in order to dramatically illustrate to my oncologist the adverse effects of her actions on my psychological frame of mind.
My trip to Washington had successfully distracted me from the sudden sketchy revision to my treatment plan, which I had hoped was a strange misunderstanding on my part. But when I came home, the story was lamentably the same. Dr. Jeffreys scheduled me for an appointment with a radiologist. I cried. A lot. And then I scheduled my own appointment with a second opinion oncologist at Froedtert's Medical College of Wisconsin.
Froedtert's Dr. Fenske confirmed what Dr. Jeffrey's had told me: the standard of care for bulky tumors greater than ten centimeters is chemo
plus radiation.
"
Double turds!" I thought to myself.
Fortunately, Fenske didn't stop there. Radiation, he affirmed, would indeed decrease my chance of relapse, but only by 3%. Moreover, the long term survival of patients receiving just chemo versus those receiving chemo plus radiation was virtually the same. Considering how well my body had responded to the chemo and how great my scans looked, Fenske didn't seem to think radiation would do much more than the drugs had. He warned that the risks of radiation near my heart and through breast tissue could outbalance the 3% chance against relapse. The decision was mine, but he encouraged me to feel satisfied with the treatment I had already received and the incredible progress I'd made. "Worse case scenario," he added, "if--God forbid--it did come back, there are other treatment options ready for you. Radiation isn't your one and only chance to survive this."
This was exactly what I wanted to hear, so I questioned whether I had heard correctly. I'd spent three weeks trying to accept that radiation therapy was my inescapable fate and that I'd have to choose between probably getting Hodgkin's again or probably getting breast cancer later. I endeavored to imagine what kind of criminal fuckery I'd committed in a past life to deserve getting the rug pulled out from under me not once, but twice when I felt I was crossing the treatment finish line. I prepared myself for the humiliation of telling my school and my students and all their parents that I wasn't coming back to work, weeks after I had told them I was. But this Fenske guy was setting me loose! I suddenly felt ridiculous for all the
'nearly every day's I had marked on the mental heath questionnaire an hour prior.
Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by the following problems? a) feeling down, depressed or hopeless, b) trouble falling or staying... ALL THE THINGS, EVERYDAY, GIVE ME A XANAX NOW.
So I left Fenske's office and called the radiologist and cancelled my appointment. I went home and drank tequila. And now I've spent the last week trying to convince myself that this is real--that for now, I don't have to take anymore drugs or get zapped by lasers. I'm still bald, and I still have a lot of doctor appointments on the horizon, but otherwise, I can start to remember what it's like to be a normal Danielle Lynne. A normal blue-haired, rock-loving, potion-drinking, apocalypse-obsessed Danielle Lynne. Oh, how novel.
