5

Although our research had given us hope for a surgical solution, we knew now that it wasn’t an option.

When cancer is growing fast and in multiple organs, surgery is not an option, and neither is radiation—there are just too many tumors to cut out or burn out; in fact, surgery can spread the cancer and make it grow faster.

Systemic chemo is the only option. The chemo has to be toxic and strong in order to destroy cancer.

So tolerating chemo becomes the first and most important step in surviving cancer.

Chemo is a bitch—the only thing worse is cancer.

It is important to remember when you have little or no hair, blisters in your mouth, and scabs on your skin, when your feet are numb and you are throwing up and wearing rubber panties, that chemo will almost kill you, but cancer will kill you.

So, no matter how bad it gets, if you really want to live, you have to learn to deal with it.

On my first day of chemo, the oncology nurse and I picked out the most visible vein, a long blue vein in my left forearm. I was so thin from weight loss that the skin on my arms looked as if it were stretched over bone. The thin vein would be used that day to spew CT contrast solution into my chest and pelvis to take pictures of the spreading cancer; to extract six large vials of blood to check every blood marker before chemo; and to infuse almost six hours of toxic chemotherapy into my body.

As soon as the oxaliplatin began to course through my veins, my saliva glands reacted with sharp, pulsating pain. My mouth became very dry, as if my saliva glands had shut down and stopped working. When I blinked, my eyelids felt numb and sticky. The drug was attacking every moisture gland in my body, temporarily numbing and paralyzing. I tried to take a sip of room-temperature water, but it froze my throat and I could not swallow properly.

I read Psalms and Proverbs from Father Waddy’s worn prayer book and clutched my family’s hands for strength and comfort.

After six hours of oxaliplatin and Avastin infusion, I still was not finished with chemotherapy. One of the prescribed chemotherapies, Xeloda, was not infused directly into my veins; I took it orally in pill form. Before leaving Stanford Cancer Center, Dale picked up the two-week prescription. It came with a warning: potentially fatal toxic effects cannot be excluded.

I was to take six chemo pills a day, three in the morning and three at night, for fourteen days—a total of 42,000 milligrams.

Within days, the skin on my hands and the bottom of my feet darkened and started to peel, revealing blister-looking sores. Those innocent-looking peach pills were burning the skin right off my feet and hands, from the inside out.

I soon learned that before every chemo infusion, the nurse steps you on the scales and weighs you. The amount of chemo they can inject in your veins that day depends on your weight. Knowing that chemo was the difference between life and death, I meticulously recorded every milligram of chemo injected and my weight.

When my weight started to plummet, I picked up a pocketful of large smooth rocks from the beach near where I lived, each weighing a pound or more. When I went to the cancer center for chemotherapy, I wore my husband’s extra-large jacket and put the rocks in the pockets, in plastic baggies to keep them from clicking together.

I told no one, not even my husband. My secret was safe until one chilly day he put on the jacket and discovered rocks in his pocket. He laughed—and understood.

I was determined to not die from cancer. Even if it meant putting rocks in my pocket to make up for weight lost, and never reducing the chemotherapy keeping my cancer under control.

That is how much I wanted to live.

My body became my soul mate, my dearest friend, and my battle buddy. I was not going to make it through chemo unless my body allowed me to. The physical body does not like to be hurt, but when it is hurt, it wants to be comforted. I learned quickly to console my body, to hug it before chemo, and afterward to caress tender arm veins bruised from needles. I treated my body like a hurt baby with no understanding why something was happening and no control over what it was going through.

But my body wasn’t enough to get me through this. My body could withstand vicious physical assaults, but it could not control fear. I would need to learn to control my emotional mind and not let it interfere with my body.

The emotional mind can make the body sicker; it can paralyze the body with fear. The mind is full of falsehoods like, “I am dying, and there is nothing I can do about it.” The emotional mind is quick to despair, and even quicker to deny. Dr. Goldfarb had warned me about denial, about patients who put off chemo or surgery, in denial of cancer’s venomous nature. Denial plus delay equals death.

I could not allow my mind to despair.

The only thing powerful enough to control my emotional mind was spirit. Just like my instinct that day of diagnosis to stop the car, to feel the wind on my face, to breathe into the space between breaths to find God; I knew I had to continually do that to not let fear find safe harbor within.

Even more important, family and friends surrounded me in prayer. Their prayers caressed and comforted my soul, much as warm blankets caressed and comforted my body during chemo.

A few days after my first round of chemo, my close friend Carmel Gouveia and I attended a three-hour deep healing workshop. The first hour of the workshop was a series of calm and soothing yoga postures. There was pressure in my lower right abdomen from the large tumors, and I was in too much pain to do deep forward bends or abdominal twists. I stopped frequently to drink water. Water seemed to help ease the nausea that came in waves; so did moving through the asanas.

After the slow yoga movements, we stretched out on the cold, bare wood floor. For two hours, I lay there in deep relaxation, all the while praying, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me.”

I looked up through the open skylight draped in a thin flowing cloth at wisps of clouds floating by and sea birds gliding in slow motion on wings of wind. I again tried to absorb the beauty into every cell in my being. Intense longing for healing and yearning for grace swelled within me. And in an instant, both the answer and resolution to the central question of my soul simultaneously flooded my heart, in the form of a prayer: “Through the grace of God and his medicine, I am healed.”

I knew I would need both: the gracious Spirit of God, along with the determined logic of the physicians managing my care. In my mind, I saw them working together, fighting for my survival. I saw a vision straight out of Braveheart: a line of Scottish Highland warriors in kilts with huge shields and long spears marching in brave unison and attacking and killing the cancer. They were advancing toward the cancer, striking and killing it with strong, accurate thrusts from their sharp spears.

The vision was so strong I could hear marching feet and see the cancer in me dying.

“Through the grace of God and his medicine, I am healed” became my constant prayer. The prayer awakened with me each day, coming on the wings of the morning. It followed in my heart through the day and was on my lips as I drifted to sleep at night.

After the second chemotherapy treatment, the intense abdominal cramping slowly began to subside, and there was also less pain in my pelvic area. My appetite remained healthy. I had learned to control the nausea and diarrhea, though sores and dry mouth were a constant issue.

I prayed that all these were signs the chemo was working. I would not allow any other belief into my mind.

I was determined to do whatever it took to kill the cancer.

After each chemo infusion, I had difficulty swallowing and was extremely sensitive to cold. I couldn’t drink any liquid, even tap water, without first warming it up. I wore plastic gloves to reach into the refrigerator. The arm where chemo was infused felt like sharp needles pricking the skin, and I was unable to bear any clothing touching the entire forearm. When I tried to eat, the first release of saliva caused intense jaw pain. Even taking a warm sip of tea was enough to cause me to cry out in pain.

I felt a daily need to flush the toxic chemo from my body. I drank more than a gallon of water a day and walked an hour or more, usually in the early morning dawn. Walking was a spiritual experience, a time to pray and connect with joy. I had to do everything in my power to enable the chemotherapy to flow through quickly and not to linger, to focus its destructive forces on cancer cells, and then remove its poison from my body.

Shortly after I was diagnosed, someone brought over a copy of Lance Armstrong’s book, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. I knew he had kicked cancer’s butt and come back stronger than ever, so I was happy to gain his knowledge from his experience.

And when I put down his book, I understood something profoundly. Edie, if you can move, you’re not sick.

I decided right then and there that no matter what cancer did to me, I would continue to move. Movement was what the physical body was designed to do; it was how it coped and functioned. Movement was vitality. It was life.

I would move. Always. No matter what. Until my last breath, I would move.