It's Always Something (13 page)

W
hen I was little I used to lie in bed at night and think about how glad I was that I was a girl and not a boy ’cause boys had to go into the army. I never wanted to fight in a war; it seemed too scary. Now, here I was, deeply embroiled in the battle of my life—a war against cancer taking place inside my own body. Chemical warfare. My weapons were cisplatin and Cytoxan, and just a few days after the mercury bag episode I was back in the hospital to do battle—chemo number three. My continuing sessions with Joanna Bull taught me that my mind was another powerful weapon. Joanna was my drill sergeant. We met every week to talk about cancer and chemotherapy.

Joanna taught me a wonderful thing to incorporate into my daily visualization: that cancer cells are remarkably stupid. They are just the dumbest things you could imagine. They are like the guys in the foxhole who are supposed to be hiding from the enemy but who stand up and say, “I can’t take it any more,” and then get shot. When they see the chemo coming they run out and yell, “I’m here, I’m here.” Your normal cells get hit by the chemicals and they are jolted, but they aren’t stupid—they are smart and they say, “I’ll just get myself back together again.” That’s why chemotherapy works, because of how stupid cancer cells are. I loved imagining them this way instead of giving them any power over my body.

During my recovery from the operation, I would lie on my back on my bed and do a very quick Gilda version of Joanna’s relaxation. For twenty minutes or more every morning, I would go from relaxation to visualization and imagery. I would curl my toes and relax them really quick; tense my legs and relax them really quick; tense my stomach and relax it quickly; take my fists and hold them and squeeze them together until they shook with tension and then let them go. Next I squitched up my whole face like you wouldn’t believe so that the tip of my nose was white, squitched it up and relaxed it; and then I opened my mouth as wide as I could, opened my eyes as wide as they possibly could be, and then let everything go. I found that after going through that, almost torturing my body into tension and release, my body felt totally relaxed.

From this state of relaxation I would visualize, but my visualizations incorporated improvisation. For example, I saw the word
RELAX
as pillows—huge, overstuffed furniture pillows in the shape of the letters. I would imagine crawling into each letter and finding a place in the letter where I could curl up and feel safe and relaxed. In the
R,
I’d go in the hole at the top of the
R
and get in there, and then I’d crawl off the big pillow
R
and crawl onto the
E,
onto the shelf of the middle part of the
E.
They were capital letters, so I could slip down the
L
and sit on the base of it and then crawl back into the hole in the
A
and stay there for a little while, then sit on the top of the
X.
I would be so happy in that little relaxed pillow, crawling all around in there. When I got tired of doing that, I turned it into an air mattress that floated in the pool on a clear, bright, shiny day. I’d lie on the word
RELAX
in the pool and let the sun warm me. Once again I would feel safe and calm.

Joanna encouraged me in one of our sessions to focus on the area of my cancer, the pelvic region and the peritoneal cavity (where the ovaries are). She suggested that I pour healing light in that area. That worked for me, but then I started to visualize it differently. I have always loved to do the laundry. I don’t know why, but there is something about washing a towel and then putting it in the dryer and having it come out all clean and warm and fluffy. I used to love to put my face in a freshly washed towel and smell it and then fold it. It was the idea of taking something dirty and making it clean and new. So I began to see my peritoneal cavity as this pink terry-cloth towel that was just washed. Maybe I got the idea in my mind because the doctor who operated on me had said, “We got her clean.” The towel was fresh from the dryer, warm and pink. In my mind I would pick through all the little strands of terry cloth to make sure there weren’t any little black dots of cancer. If I saw any, I would pick them out the way you’d remove lint from a towel. I saw the chemotherapy as a detergent going through there, washing and cleaning and getting rid of any dirt in the little pink terry-cloth towel inside me.

I realized that you can choose whatever way you want to visualize the battle going on inside your body. When I told Joanna that I was doing this, she was so happy. She saw that I had found my own way, that I’d discovered the tricks—and treats—of visualization.

As I approached chemo number four, I began to feel quite well physically. I had recuperated from surgery. I was swimming twenty minutes a day and playing doubles tennis on Sundays. It was becoming harder and harder to face those chemo Mondays every third week, and to know I wouldn’t feel like myself for ten days afterward. I had seven chemos to go. After that there would be a so-called second-look surgery. They would open me up again and take biopsies to see if there was any cancer left, and if so, where.

But after the third treatment I was beginning to feel the effects of so many powerful chemicals in my body. I couldn’t compare it to anything I had ever had before. You do eventually eliminate the chemicals, but I was told the cisplatin stays in your body for up to three months. Half of it is eliminated during the hour in which it is administered, but the other half works its way out over months. Because of this gradual accumulation, I found that after each treatment I was a little bit different. I never knew exactly what to expect. And of course every individual responds to these drugs in slightly different ways.

The oncologists have to tell you the worst possible side effects because they don’t want to be sued. So the Alchemist said that I could have permanent hearing loss of high-frequency sounds like a dog whistle—the loss someone in a rock band would get. I could experience numbness at the extremities because cisplatin affects the nervous system. There were a lot of other side effects, too, but since cancer kills you, you don’t have much choice.

Joanna and I would spend our weekly sessions attacking the hardships of chemotherapy. Although I faced each chemo treatment with great apprehension, she encouraged me to see them as friends. It wasn’t easy. There were Mondays when Gene drove me to the hospital and” I was crying the whole way—crying and screaming in the car, begging to get out, wanting to open the car door at a light and run away down the street. Lying in that hospital bed on Monday night knowing that the next morning I was going to be zapped and doused with chemicals, and everything was going to change for ten days, I wanted to scream. I wanted to escape, to sneak out of the hospital, take a plane to Hawaii and disappear. But what would I be running from? I would be running away from being cured.

One night in the hospital, about the fifth treatment, I couldn’t fall asleep. I knew what was coming in the morning, and I just lay in bed and started to scream.

“Get me out of here. Let me go. I don’t want this.”

It was about 2:00
A.M
. Bonnie, my nurse, had gone to the pharmacy to get everything ready for the morning. As she was coming back, Bonnie heard somebody screaming in the halls. She thought it was some elderly patient. She couldn’t believe it when she got to the room where the screaming was and it was me. She calmed me down, gave me a sleeping pill and sat by my bed. The next morning I had the treatment, just the same as the others.

Joanna helped me to understand that it was okay to get scared, and it was okay to get depressed, and it was okay to cry and scream and mourn my health and get it out of my system. I thought I had to be a brave soldier. I thought I had to withstand this treatment and not break down. But Joanna taught me that it was all right to express my feelings. One of the best things Joanna ever said to me was that after the chemicals have gone into your body to kill the cancer cells, you want to get rid of whatever you don’t need. You want to excrete them from your system. “Think of crying as just another way of eliminating the chemicals,” Joanna said. “Just think that if you cry and cry buckets of tears, you are getting rid of the chemicals you don’t need.” I always found that after a really good cry, I felt better about everything. I felt as though I got rid of some toxicity, that I got rid of some of the pain and the mourning.

But during the ten days following chemotherapy, I continued to feel weird, edgy and nauseous. I was bald and blown up from steroids. I felt separated from the rest of the world, like the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust, wandering alone amidst radioactive fallout—which, after all, produced the nauseous sickness I felt after chemotherapy. I think that image came to me because I grew up in the 1950s. When I was in school, people still believed that you could survive nuclear war. In Detroit, on Saturdays at one o’clock, the air-raid siren would go off. If you were in your car, you had to get out and lie down beside the curb or sidewalk. In school, we were supposed to get under our desks and put our heads down with our hands over our heads. I remember there would be one kid in the class who was assigned to go pull down all the window shades. But I heard if you saw the nuclear light, you would go blind, so I always thought,
Oh, please, don’t let me have the assignment of pulling down all the shades on the windows.
In one school I went to we all had to go into the hallway and put our heads between our legs.

I remember the dramatizations on television. There would be a nuclear attack, but a little girl would have left her stuffed rabbit outside in the fallout rain. She could not have it back no matter how much she cried. People would survive in horrible anxiety in their fallout shelters. I remember a “Twilight Zone” episode where the survivors fought over who would go into the fallout shelter. I had a girlfriend in school whose family actually built a fallout shelter in their backyard. At a shopping mall near our house there was a model of a fallout shelter that you could buy. Whenever that air-raid siren would go off on Saturday, or a show about nuclear war was on television, or the radio would beep for the Civil Defense announcement, I got nauseous. Something about it gave me nausea—probably because my father had been nauseated while being radiated for his brain tumor and the association was etched in my brain. I hated the fear of war, but I knew I was in a war now. Though I was surrounded with love and support, the war I was fighting often made me feel like I’d been abandoned in nuclear fallout.

During the ten days following chemo, I had tremendous mood swings. I pushed Gene’s patience to the limit. By chemo number five, I’d eaten my way up to 135 pounds. I felt bloated and fat. When Jodi, the nurse, could get off work, she’d take me out. She usually worked in the hospital intensive care unit, but she would do private duty for my chemos every three weeks. We’d go to little coffee shops, particularly one on Pico called Pappa Pete’s. It’s an old-fashioned coffee shop, not fancy or health-oriented or anything. It’s like the Greek restaurant in “Saturday Night Live”—you know, “No Coke, Pepsi . . . cheeseburger, cheeseburger.” And that is just what I felt like having—cheeseburgers and Pepsi. I remember Jane Curtin and I used to love those sketches. Belushi would take an order and Dan Aykroyd would really cook the hamburgers. Even though we ordinarily never ordered hamburgers, we thought that in this scene it was okay to have a Pepsi and a cheeseburger and a bag of chips. We’d be so happy eating on television—just two pals next to each other.

Now here I was going through cancer treatment and back in a coffee shop, this time with Jodi. I’d have a grilled cheese sandwich with pickles, and maybe some cake and ice cream, and I’d allow everything because it was curing the nausea. As in pregnancy, the eating made me feel less nauseous. Then we’d walk through malls. I couldn’t concentrate to buy anything, so we’d walk up and down. Sometimes we’d go to a movie, which was good. It took my mind off everything. It was important to get out. The chemotherapy altered my looks enough that I had some anonymity. Besides, if you are nauseated enough, no matter who you are, you don’t look like yourself. Also, if you don’t give off the aura of celebrity or act like someone famous, people don’t sense it. If I walked through that mall with a zip in my step, conscious of my persona, I knew people would be coming up to me and asking me for my autograph. But when this nauseous, bloated, spaced-out Martian was going through there with her nurse, nobody ever gave a second look.

Sometimes Jodi and I would sit in the coffee shop for three hours or more, and I would watch people come in. There was such a variety of people. They would order french fries, and meat loaf specials, and cheeseburgers. One man in the afternoon had pancakes with syrup and bacon. Sometimes they came and read. Some stayed the whole afternoon in the coffee shop. The waitresses never made us feel that we had to leave, or that they were in a hurry. Jodi was wonderful, and she knew we didn’t have to talk; we could just sit there. As I watched the customers, I’d imagine what their lives were. Why were they there? Where did they live? Did they eat there every day? I loved to see the old women who smoked cigarettes. They’d have their meal and their tea, and then they would get cigarettes out of their purses. Maybe they were fifty years old and just looked really old because they smoked, but I imagined they were eighty years old, and they smoked and survived. I had stopped smoking after my diagnosis.

During the eleven or so days between chemos when I would feel well, life got better. I could drive, and I would get interested in shopping and meeting friends for lunch. I enjoyed reachieving my independence, but there was never enough leave from the war. Once a week I still had to go to the doctor—either the internist or the Alchemist or the gynecological oncologist for a checkup and blood work. Jodi often drove me. She’d write down all my vital signs in a yellow notebook, and all my blood counts and levels and weight. She watched over me like a mother hen.