Chapter 7 – Poison
The first round of Chemo was rough. Really rough. Partly because we were new and partly because it was heavy poison.
Did you know that antibiotics are poison? Anti=Against. Bio=Life.
Antibiotics = Against Life.
And chemo is like the nuclear bomb of antibiotics. Antibiotics themselves are like little nuclear bombs. They kill everything and part of the everything they kill are the infection that’s trying to take over your body. Chemo is like this in a very general way. It kills everything and with it, the cancer. And fortunately, because our bodies are the most amazing things ever, they recover, like a forest after a fire and the hope is when the forest grows back, the cancer will not. And the justification is if you don’t wipe out the forest, the cancer will destroy it. So, nuke it all.
Like everything there are many sides. Chemo drugs are derived from nature, tree bark for some, plants, proteins…they are all natural at their core and humans have taken them and refined and refined them to their current state. For the laymen, like us back in 2017, they were poison. We didn’t know. We wanted other options. Who wants to put poison into their body that is going to destroy so much? She didn’t. And it took us many painful nights and many tears to come to the place where she walked in, cold cap and sugar packets in hand for her first session.
It seemed so harmless, so…comfortable. A well-lit room, people sitting in chairs, some sleeping, some on the phone, some with loved ones, all of them seemingly healthy but hooked up to a similar purpose and similar circumstance. When the woman administering the dose came into the well-lit space in full biohazard gear, the reality and the confusion hit. It didn’t make sense. Why was she in…that…the small plastic bag of glowing red liquid…? “That’s what was going to go into her veins?”. She was heroic in that instant and in all the other instances in which she decided to allow the “poison” into her body. She had a purpose for it, she even had a mantra that her sister wrote for her, and she spoke it every time, even years later. She spoke the mantra to direct the chemo to stay away from her healthiness.
Perhaps I was wrong about “No Heroes”. I was wrong. There are plenty of heroes. And in the moments, large and small, whether it was a self-administered shot, a third round of chemo or killing radiation, she met it face to face. She was heroic in those times. In fact it’s much more accurate to talk about being heroic than it is to say someone WAS a hero…much more accurate, and much more human.
For many months and even years. Through remissions and resurgences, her (and my) view on chemo as poison changed. It was no less poison, but we’d come to see it as a tool, the main tool of the cancer pool we inhabit. This was a good shift and not an external shift. Like so many shifts in perspective when you are part of our cancer club, they are not cheap, temporary shifts. The force of life and death now plays center stage on our fragile and innocent perspectives. When there is no escape, one comes to terms and fragile and innocent transform.
She would come home after her treatment, she’d walk out, we’d get ice cream, do the dishes, have dinner. She’s fine. This is easy. We got this.
And then…the poison did what poison does. And to a sensitive human body, like hers, it did its job. And there she lay, darkened room, no food, nausea, sickness worse than she ever felt from the cancer. For hours and days, she was in her room.
But it was good, right? It was poison, but it was good and if she was sick, it was better than being dead and if she was sick, it meant the cancer was being killed. Right?
Right?
Edited 2/12/23 – MORE TO DO
Edited 2/17/24 – It’s interesting, notable for me, to see the time span on my edits, when I first looked back on the original post it was not a month yet since she had died. Now it’s a year and a month. In my second edit in ’24 I had the urge, natural and somewhat unconscious, to change the tense to reflect my current reality of looking back. But when I wrote this, Sally was still alive. There’s plenty more to write about this today. Every day more and more information comes out about how we treat cancer and disease in general, every day it becomes clearer how well meaning our savagery is. The doctors were unequivocal about the fact that Sally died from her treatment and the effects of her treatment. Unequivocal. She did not die OF cancer. She died from her body being destroyed by all the drugs and treatments to…what…what…rid herself of cancer? But they told us, back in 2017, they told us… “You’re going to die of this”. They didn’t say you’re going to die of the treatment, but they said she was going to die from it. They didn’t say she was going to die from the treatment. But she did. She died from the treatment of her cancer.