I stopped chemotherapy about a year ago. Having been on that regiment for three some odd
years… it took about six months for my body to wash all the residual toxins away,
and trust me, I marked, in red, the day the effects were gone.
Aside from being furnace hot and never sleeping two continuous
hours, I would have said that there were no side effects from the chemotherapy.
Superficially, I am now aware of many more physical side effects, from my slendering physique to the frequent compliments on my skin's glow.
But these are the fairly inconsequential.
Having been off chemotherapy for nearly a year, I was categorically wrong
on so many fronts about the side effects. As I sit here, a tumultuous
mess of emotions, I am aware of how emotionally castrated I was by the
chemotherapy. In some ways, this was
exceptional. I was never terribly bothered. But on the other hand, like a
depressive waking from a winter fog, the world is just so much more rich now.
For the most part, this makes me seem a ridiculously happy person from the
outside. I would say, it is actually pretty damn true to the depths of my core.
But man, when I get upset, I feel like a two year old having a tantrum, beet
red, face a splash of tears, snot dripping from my nose, trembling with over
powering emotion. And I can see the irrationality. And I can feel the
chemistry. And I am as confused by it from the inside as I am overpowered by
its force.
The castration, for far too much information, was very physical
as well. At thirty something, to effectively go through puberty for the second
time in life, is a bizarre experience. I was sitting on the bus one day,
feeling mentally uncomfortable and not able to figure out why. It was an
experience I cannot properly describe.
Uncomfortable in my own skin. The
next day, I was reminded, this sensation… PMS.
After seven years of various forms of hormonal manipulation
related to cancer, I got my period, unanticipated, clearly, for the
first time in years, six months after stopping chemotherapy. Having fallen
asleep at a platonic coworker’s, I completely saturated, like a slaughtered pig, his white linens.
While we pass at work, we have never spoken again.
Every girl has their pubescent accident story from her
teenage years. Try it on when you are thirty something, your accident is about
two pints of blood (well, it felt that way), the sheets were brand new white,
and he is a platonic coworker.
I am startlingly willing to share, with the world, my
mortification perhaps because, it seems alien to me. Perhaps it is just one of the funnier indignities gifted to me by cancer.
This whole being a woman thing, which I took a time out from
for so many years, it is just fucking crazy.
I am batshit in love with this guy, from a distance, like a fourteen
year old girl with posters on her bedroom walls. It is the most absurd, distracting,
intoxicating, biological magnetism. How on earth does anyone get anything done
if they ever feel like this?
And this goes to something else I feel cancer took from me.
While all my friends were pairing off and finding love, I was textbook
interested, but I was not compelled or animalistically driven to it like I am now.
I honestly question if I could fall in love when I was on chemotherapy. I
really feel that love is a physiological ability, biological function, primal instinct, cellular attraction, an ephemeral, intangible sensation, that was simply amputated, like my breasts,
or perhaps shed, like my hair.
No longer on chemotherapy, I know the world is the same
place, but my experience of it is so much different.
Cool: On the right day, which is pretty much most days, the
joys of biology when happy, or in love, or in bed….
Stupid: How on earth do you people get anything done with
all these hormones in the way. Seriously!
