The Indignities of Cancer

My wonderful hairdresser thought I might feel better about shaving my head

if she did up my make-up and gave me fake eye lashes.

One day, right after I found out I had cancer, I was doing the Workout of the Day ("WOD") at my gym. This is before I started chemo and I was feeling fine. It was a long workout that involved wall balls. Wall balls are my nemesis as I rarely breathe properly and end up panting and feeling like my arms might fall off. (For those who might not know, "wall balls" are squatting below parallel and then standing up as you throw a weighted ball at a 10-foot target. The prescribed weight of the wall ball for women is usually 14 pounds.) And I remember thinking, screw it, I have cancer, I can just stop now and no one will question it. I had my moment and then picked up the ball and started getting the wall balls done. And I just repeated over and over, no one is going to feel sorry for you.

Fast forward to this week. I'm a week out from chemo and I'm slowly crawling out of the hell hole of it and starting to feel better. But my mouth hurts and my tongue has white bumps on it, and my throat hurts. And I'm so effing tired but I am determined to work my regular hours at my job. Seth had a dentist appointment on Tuesday so I had him ask the dentist if he could recommend any mouthwash or toothpaste that might help. The dentist ended up writing a prescription for me for some mouthwash. Being the cautious person that I am, I emailed my oncologist on Wednesday morning to make sure that this was OK with him. He usually responds within the hour but I didn't get a response until 4:50 pm. My doctor was out of the office so his partner emailed me. He said that he thought I had thrush (very common for chemo patients) and he had called in a prescription for me for that. I Googled it because I wasn't exactly sure what thrush is. It's a yeast infection in your mouth. GROSS! So, I left work at 5 and traffic was bad. It took me 30 minutes to get home and I live 2.7 miles from the office. And somewhere in those 30 minutes I lost it and started feeling sorry for myself. First I lose all my hair and feel ugly and now I have a yeast infection in my mouth. I'm not even mentioning the constipation/diarrhea/hemorrhoid extravaganza. Could I be any more disgusting?

I got home and ate peanut butter cups and drank ginger beer (non-alcoholic) and cried. FWIW, ginger beer is one of the few things I can still taste and that tastes good to me so I drink it a lot. It's all carbs. I'm sure I don't need the sugar but it's worth it just to taste something. The other day I had a donut and it tasted like cardboard. I threw it away after eating half of it. What's the point if you can't taste it? A DONUT!!!

I felt sorry for myself for the rest of the week. I ate french fries (with an obscene amount of salt) and cried a lot. 

And then on Saturday morning, I came to the revelation that I was feeling sorry for myself and that was no way to act. This is not how I want to act. This is not the person I want to be.

I got dressed and went to the 8 am CrossFit X-Diesel workout. As I had each day that I worked out, I wore a head scarf to cover up my bald head. But half way through this workout, I ripped it off and worked out with my bald head showing. It was a long workout with a 35-minute time cap. I was the last one done but I finished it. It felt good. I know that CrossFit seems like a cult or crazy to some people but it is something that really keeps me going. I find myself in those workouts. I find the person that I want to be in those workouts. And that person is not someone who feels sorry for herself (for very long).