One Must Imagine Sisyphus a Cancer Patient
Getting better so you can get worse again.
I watched my health app like a hawk. When would the next test results come through? How were my liver enzymes this week? And a whole list of other things I never considered would concern me at age 25. Week after week I watched as the thin needle dipped further and further into the yellow territory of the imaginary meter, representing my declining red blood cell count.
In the public consciousness, chemotherapy is an infusion. Maybe it lasts an hour, and as soon as the poison hits your blood stream you feel ill, nauseous, out of breath. In reality, receiving chemotherapy is a long process that lasts an entire day at minimum and an entire week on the lengthier end. The marathon at the cancer center all begins with a blood test.
The blood lab at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute was a terrifyingly efficient machine. The waiting area at the lab was as intimidating as walking in to the DMV, but with shorter wait times and a lot more bald people. Nurses filed out of the saloon style hospital doors one by one calling out name after name to access their veins, the fastest phlebotomists in The West.
No sooner would I stand up from my seat and walk back out to the waiting area, when my phone would ping: my blood test results were already ready. As a patient, the trip to the oncologist, feels like a lot of hurry up and wait, but in the background a highly advanced and intricate scientific system is carefully concocting the potion that will save your life.
The pharmacists at the cancer center make every batch of chemotherapy individually, based on your height, weight, vital signs, and blood test results. Weaker vital signs? Your dose of chemo will be specially crafted so as to not kill you.
But with every test, there is a way to fail. If your liver enzymes are too high, your white or red blood cell count too low, your oncologist will delay your treatment until they return to normal. This is a highly anxiety antagonizing part of the process for cancer patients who need to receive infusions on a timely basis to keep killing the cancer effectively.
Because chemotherapy is a blunt instrument, killing all fast growing cells in your body (regardless of whether they are malignant or healthy) it weakens you. Makes you sick, or unable to eat, gives you bone pain as your marrow disintegrates, irritates your liver as you process the toxins, and eventually slides you closer and closer to anemia. This is why chemotherapy treatments are timed the way they are: a hearty dose of poison, and a week (or three) for your body to recover, only to start the healing process all over again.
I carried the boulder that was my body up Storrow drive once every three weeks so that I could find out if I was healed enough to get sick again, and I sat in the waiting area of the blood lab, wondering if this week I would pass the test. Hoping to God that I might pass one more week.
This was one of the most demoralizing aspects of cancer treatment. Cancer (at least my cancer) is usually not painful in and of itself, but its treatment certainly is. The illness that beset me the first week after my infusion was furious and unabating. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stay awake, couldn’t starve, but couldn’t eat. My body felt like a burden my mind was trying to escape. But then, almost as suddenly as the symptoms appeared, they went away, and I felt stronger, hungrier, clearer–finally returning to my life as I wanted it.
These feelings were a result of my liver normalizing, my marrow strengthening, my blood returning, and it was all so that I could do it all again, once the shadow of my last infusion finally passed over my head.
This was the Sisyphean promise of chemotherapy: that every part per million earned, would be a part per million sacrificed at the altar of health.
The implications of this absurd exercise continue to affect my psyche, as I await the karmic retribution of a good feeling–laughter with the promise of tears, energy with the promise of fatigue, serenity with the promise of anxiety. This too shall pass, but then begin again.