I was flying through days one to three of the first treatment without even the slightest reaction, and I was a little spooked. It might have been the steroids that had me amped and busy cleaning out closets at two in the morning. Or the Zofran, a very effective antinausea medication, that had kept the side effects at bay, but suddenly on day four the chemo was in me, on me, through me. It began with mild skirmishes and then, within minutes, there was all-out body war.
Chemotherapy can kill cancer cells if it can stop them from dividing. The faster the division of cells, the more hope of zapping them and dissolving the tumor. I no longer had any tumor or cancer cells. The chemo was going after the possibility of cells: any lone soldier cell that brazenly began forming would be zapped in the act of creation, or commit cell suicide, something called self-death or apoptosis. I was lucky that my cancer was the kind in which cells did rapidly divide, the kind that chemo was most effective at killing. But sadly it couldn’t distinguish those cells from the healthy ones. It attacked them where they grew the fastest: in the blood, the mouth, the hair, the stomach, and the bowels. My stomach and colon were already vulnerable from the months of infection, which is why on day four, my whole lower body shut down, literally. My stoma and the surrounding area had already proved to be highly sensitive and would swell whenever I ate the wrong food or was even a little anxious. Then I wouldn’t be able to anchor the bag properly on the swollen surface and it would fall off or break open. But now something else was going on. Well, actually nothing was going on. That was the problem. My poop and my body had come to a complete standstill. It was as if my body had been scared into shock and had died, even though I still seemed to be breathing. I began to get sick, really sick, nauseous and dizzy and weak. My goddaughter, Adisa, and my niece Katherine, had volunteered to take care of their auntie godmother for the weekend. I didn’t want to worry them, so I really tried to ignore what was happening, to eat things that would make the nausea better. But all that did was further clog the drain. My stomach began to swell around the stoma and I felt worse, sicker, vomiting and spinning until sometime very early in the morning I found myself crawling on all fours, moaning in pain. My bag was empty. Before I knew it, I was back in the hospital, strapped to an IV. I had a serious obstruction—an obstacle, a block, a barricade.
I was back in the room with the tree. This time I felt lonely and sad, deeply sad. Some part of me didn’t want to cooperate or move forward.
The tree seemed to mock my self-pity. I was raging, I was totally exhausted by myself, exhausted by my desperate fear of vanishing into ordinary. I was at the end of my body’s road. Everything had stopped inside me, even tears. I passed out.
When I woke up my bag was full and life, it seemed, was coursing through me. The tree had worked its magic. What I didn’t know was that the tree was actually inside me and saving my life. It turns out that Taxol, one of my chemo chemicals, is found in the bark of the ancient yew tree. Even better, the Taxol is made from the needles of the tree, so the tree does not have to be destroyed. Taxol functions to stabilize the cell structure so solidly that killer cells cannot divide and multiply.
It was a tree that was calming and protecting me, fortifying my cell structure so it was safe from attack. I had finally found my mother.