Aliza Pollack – on finishing chemotherapy.
Los Angeles
July 10, 2000
Dear M -
It’s clear to me now that I felt very little relief while I was going through chemotherapy. There was happiness and there were certainly moments of joy – it was not all dire – but there was clearly no relief. But after the sixth and final chemo, I felt relief, and it was new, and delicious. When I got over the major nausea and grogginess (around Wednesday), I could hardly recognize the person who went through those months of chemotherapy. It felt like me, but a much more serious, heavier me. And for the first time, I could actually look back at the whole experience and feel like something had been accomplished here. I did something. Prior to that, each chemo was its own island. I never really thought, “I’ve gone through four, isn’t that great?” I kept on thinking, “Damn, the fifth is going to be unpleasant too.” But after the sixth, I felt like the whole five months was like a handkerchief blowing in the wind. Gone.
It took me a very long time to unpack my chemo bag. I took out the magazines that I hadn’t read and prepped myself to get through them, but I couldn’t even look at them. They just screamed “chemotherapy.” I had to throw them out. I also threw out the bag. I threw the whole package into the clean, white, plastic garbage can in the kitchen and then had to take the whole bit to the bin outside. I didn’t want any of it in my house. When the garbage trucks came on Tuesday, I finally felt some closure or escape or something. Distance. I didn’t throw out the CD player or the CD’s, but I’m not touching them for a while. The worst thing would be to play something and be taken right back to those pale pink recliners at the doctor’s office and that nasty red fluid dripping into my arm.
I am now nine days into radiation, and it is draining me. I’m running out of energy to play this game called cancer. It’s a marathon, and I’m a sprinter by nature. I like going from event to event, using the momentum of each as a springboard to keep me interested. I’m not good with long things. After a while, I don’t know what to do with myself. While chemotherapy was horrible and I am not interested (ever) in repeating the experience, at least I understood the schedule. I would be down, then up, then down again. I understood how it worked, how it would make me feel, and what I would be capable of. I was able to plan. I could count on throwing up at least once, craving a grilled cheese sandwich after four days, not sleeping through the night while on the steroids, driving on my own by Tuesday (the fifth day after treatment). By the end of the first week, I’d be able to read a sentence without it jumping all over the page. It was important to me that I could count on this schedule. There was something wonderfully comforting in the predictability of it all.
Radiation, though, is an entirely different ballgame. Every day I spend twenty or thirty minutes at the doctor’s office, depending on how backed up the radiation technician is. The actual radiation only takes thirty seconds (fifteen seconds for my front chest, fifteen seconds for my back chest), but there seems to be a pile-up of humans in the morning – which is when I have my appointment – and sometimes it feels a bit too much like waiting for your car to be serviced, only I’m the car. While I’m in the waiting room, trying to read whatever I’ve brought in or the unbelievably outdated and frayed MODE and Good Housekeeping magazines stuffed into the magazine racks, everything seems normal. I feel normal. Way more normal than chemotherapy. There are no needles, no drugs, no nausea. Each day is the same. I drive myself to the doc after sleeping the whole night; I’m showered and wearing real clothes, not sweatpants; sometimes lipstick has been applied; I talk back to idiotic morning radio hosts and sing ‘N Sync songs out loud in the privacy of my car; I exchange hellos and little small talk-y jokes with the parking lot attendants and the guy who runs the coffee cart. They recognize me. It feels like I’m going to my office. It is the most regular gig I’ve had in months.
It all feels really normal until something, and it only has to be a little thing, reveals that it is not. It could be the person in the elevator who smiles a bit differently, a bit nervously, when she notices the little round sticker with an X right in the middle of my chest, then looks at my close-fitting hat to confirm her suspicion, her fear. I can almost hear her thinking, how can it be? That girl’s so young. I feel like I’m introducing a brutal jolt of reality into her life. Once the elevator door opens, she scrambles out, hugging her child close to her chest.
It could be the other people waiting in the doctor’s office. The octogenarians. All of them, as usual, looking at me with a mix of curiosity and sympathy – again, it’s the “she’s so young” line. How can I possibly respond to that? Yes, I am only twenty-nine. Yes, I do have cancer. Yes, it sucks. There are moments when youth is a trophy – your first novel/film/business/whatever at a young age. It inspires a certain kind of awe. In this case though, youth is depressing. When I look at the other people in the office, I feel unlucky. They’ve had years of freedom. I’ve got years ahead of me, knowing that I have this in my history. I have to think about recurrence, the consequences of the treatments, fertility implications.
Or perhaps it’s when I’m alone in the radiation room, silent, lying like a slab of meat atop the metal table, being raised toward the ceiling. Maybe it’s when I’m staring at the radiation machine – a square box, suspended above me – and the specially made metal block in the shape of my tumor that the rays must go through. While I know I don’t want to see it and don’t need to see it, I can’t help but look at it. It’s so big, I think. Is that the original size of my tumor, before chemotherapy, or the current size, after chemotherapy? I’m too afraid to ask. I don’t want to know. I’d rather come to my own conclusions than be told the worst.
Or when I’m trying to clear my head and think pleasant thoughts during the thirty seconds that I’m being zapped. Hard as I try to reach some transcendent, meditative state, I’m always counting the seconds in my head. I get past fifteen, to forty-five, and I wonder if the technician is having a coffee. Has she gone to the bathroom mid-session? Is there a timer or does she use her watch? Does she know that she’s gone over? Then I think of the consequences of too much radiation.
Honestly, I try to turn my brain off. I try to move through the world as if everything is fine, but I am always reminded, in some way, that this is what is going on with me and it is unusual. I can’t completely dismiss this anxiety over my health, my life, the way other people who do not have cancer can. I can feel it. In the back of my mind. Floating. I wish I lived in a comic book or a cartoon. No meaningful context to life, no great consequences to actions, just moving from incident to incident without thought. Road runner-esque. Pummeled in one panel and ready for more in the next.
Aliza
