An airing of the malaises

A memory: 

Once, when I was in college, I stole someone's jacket. 

Well, stealing is too strong a word, maybe. I went into the Commons (our on-campus dining hall) wearing the flannel jacket my mom had bought me back in California, mistakenly thinking it would keep me warm in an Iowa winter. On the way in, I hung up my coat, and when my friends and I left an hour or so later, I grabbed another flannelish coat on my way out.

I wore this coat for an entire night full of the usual shenanigans like beating a path through the snow to a friend's off-campus apartment and back, heading to the library and later the chem lab to retrieve J, taking security stairs onto the roofs of buildings just because, making a grocery run in a friend's car with the defroster blasting away, etc. It wasn't until I was back in my dorm with my roommate that I finally unbuttoned the coat I'd been wearing all night and realized it wasn't mine. 

"Whose coat is this?" I demanded. 

S laughed. "I've been wondering that all night."

First thing in the morning, sheepish, I returned to the Commons where my own lonely flannel was hanging and surreptiously made the switch. 

**

For almost two months, I have been wearing someone else's body.

I mean this semi-literally, as a donor tissue recipient. In the morning, I shower, carefully dabbing around the scab on my left side that just won't fall off, and then I towel dry in front of the mirror, giving my alien body only shy, sideways glances. 

Dressed in my customary bookish tee and cardigan, I manage to feel normal all day long. I feel pretty good, even. It's not until late at night, when I trade jeans for PJs, when I shed the only bra that fits me (and even so leaves a small ring of bruises), that it hits me again. 

Whose body is this? 

**

Two weeks ago, I began hormone therapy with the drug tamoxifen.It's a small white pill, taken daily, but it's also a highly toxic, carcinogenic drug -- the pharmacist, handing it over, instructed me to wash my hands after handling the pill, and to not let anyone else in my household come into contact with it. 

Tamoxifen works like this: it blocks estrogen, which will prevent my estrogen-receptor positive cancer from recurring. (As Dr. N explained: the surgery is the cure; the treatment will prevent it from coming back.) With the hormone blocked, I can expect many of the symptoms of menopause, which since I'm knocking on the door of 50, are coming for me anyway. 

Before taking my first dose, I was assigned an "educational meeting" with a nurse in the oncology department. I sat quietly in the patient's chair while the nurse read off the list of side effects and warnings from her computer screen:  

hot flashes or sudden flushing
nausea
swelling of hands, feet or other parts of the body
vaginal discharge and/or bleeding
changes in mood
irregular menstrual bleeding

She told me to be on the alert for blood clots in my legs, cloudy eye lenses, changes in liver function. Further down on the list, it was noted that tamixofen can increase my chance of getting a second cancer, which seems to me highly unproductive. 

"I'm requiring a monthly pregnancy test," she continued, since tamoxifen can cause congenital deformities. I flashed back to my long medical history, the years of trying to get pregnant, and thought bitterly about how ironic life can be. 

"Do you understand?" she asked, probably for the second time, and I realized from my slow blinking that she might have thought I wasn't paying attention, which is fair. I get lost in my head sometimes. 

I cleared my throat. "I understand." 

She placed the paper into a very official -ooking folder, one I later added to my collection of official-looking folders dating back to my cancer diagnosis in September. I was sitting very quietly, digesting hot flashes and changes in liver function, when she added brightly, "Most people don't experience any side effects at all." 

Somehow I knew I wouldn't be most people, if that was even true. 

**
​
I have joked about hot flashes in the past, like how will I know I'm having a hot flash, since I'm always so warm?

If you were unaware, I am a sweaty individual who has to suffer through six months of Central Valley summer every year. It takes all my effort to stop myself from whining every ten minutes about how hot it is. And where I live, it happens to not get very cold in the winter, either (**I will fight you on this, Californians, having lived in Ohio and Iowa**), so I don't require a winter coat, and a few years ago, finding no need for them, I gave up socks--except for the pair by my bed, which I slip onto my feet before sleep and then wriggle out of within the first hour.

So what does a hot flash feel like? (If you know this already, feel free to skip ahead. For the uninitiated, this may be useful.) I've had only one so far, and it went like this: I was asleep, and then I was on fire. I couldn't see the flames, but they were there, devouring me. I had to kick off the covers, startling the rat terrier who sleeps at my feet, and I had the panicky feeling that I wouldn't be able to untangle myself fast enough. I glanced at Will, who was apparently not on fire, as I wriggled out of my PJs, and that's when my sleepy mind realized: hot flash. 

**

The worst symptom, by far, has been the nausea. As the oncology nurse explained, people who experience nausea from Tamoxifen have found it best to take the pill at night, since the effects are apparently lessened when the body isn't up and moving around. 

I've been taking the pill about half an hour before sleep, and the nausea wakes me an hour or two later. Not a stomach lurching, just an urgent feeling in the base of my throat. I've tried peppermint Tums, ginger drops (thank you to the person who mailed me those, seriously), sitting up, walking around, drinking water, reading (what doesn't that cure?), scrolling through reels that confirm my feeling that the world is going quite badly (not a good cure), and the last of the anti-nausea pills leftover from my surgery, all with very mixed results. Twice, I have felt like I didn't sleep at all the entire night and have spent the next day in a head fugue. Twice, in the middle of the day, I've had to rush to the bathroom to vomit, making it just in time. 

Mostly, I've been groggy, probably due to being up half the night every night. I made a silly error at the bookstore, for which the customer was very kind. I tackled very little from my weekly to-do list and then tried to do it all in one afternoon, which was predictably disastrous. 

**

I'm writing this in a coffee shop on a Friday morning, the first day all week I've felt like I have a clear head and a bit of motivation. I thought I picked a place where I wouldn't encounter anyone I know, but Modesto is a big city/small town, and so I ran into T, who has a nursing background and has worked as a public health official, and we started talking about my treatment. 

"How long are you on tamoxifen?"

I grimaced. "Two to five years." 

She smiled sympathetically, and reminded me that my body will likely adjust. (The nurse said the same thing -- and if my body just can't do it, there is another path.) 

It's helpful, I know, to take a long view. Two weeks is not even a hundredth of the way into five years, a fact that's both encouraging and depressing at the same time. 

**

In the beginning, I wasn't going to share any of this. I was stunned by my diagnosis into a sort of numbness that was likely denial, a stage of grief. But then it became impractical and awkward to tell some people and not others, to field questions about why I wasn't teaching and wasn't in the bookstore, to run into people I knew in the waiting room of the breast health department and not say anything.

And so, this blog. 

Last week at Thanksgiving, W told me that she had shared my blog with a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. It's humbling to think of any of you reading this at all, but it gives me just a little bit of pride to think that maybe, maybe, some of this could be helpful. 

Until next time,
​P. ​