Lemonade

“How do you do that?” He asked.

“Do what?” I was confused.

“Make lemonade out of lemons?”

It seemed like such a strange thing to say that it took a minute for me to register it.

It didn't feel like I was making anything into anything else. I know that my entire life has been driven by creativity, and no illness, no matter how dire, would ever take that away from me. I know that being creative always takes me to a sacred place. A place that could never be tainted by pain, sorrow, or hardship. When I create, I am safe. It is a place where all of me stands as I always was. Not broken or weak. Not partial or faded. Not sick. It is the safest place for who I am, because it will always be all of me. No matter how I feel or look or am physically. It is where I am whole. So when I am only a shell of the person I was, I escape to creativity and I find myself there. The pieces that are missing find their way back to me. The broken bits that have fallen off as I fight this horror. I remember the things that exist in this world that chemo and cancer can’t take from me. And that is beauty. The beauty I create and enable. That is untouchable. That is the core of who I am, my happiness, and who will remain. No matter how broken I become.

I was doing well. I hadn't really felt much pain in months. I ended up skipping one chemo to just take a break. Then all hell broke loose. I began to feel pain chronically in my lower abdomen again. Where my tumor is. It wasn't going away. Then another pain made itself known. It was incredible. It was at my stomach. High in my abdomen. It was so intense that I could do nothing but cry and wail in response, curled up in a ball. My father wanted to take me to the emergency room and I fought him. I knew what the ER meant. It meant hours of waiting. It meant tests, it meant exhaustive questions and hours of being a pin cushion. It meant blood draws. And days, maybe weeks of bruises, weird tell tale signs, and evidentiary marks on my body. It could also mean relief. When I finally relented, the pain became much milder. We had actually made it to the ER when the pain subsided. So we went home. I woke the next day to more of the mammoth pain from the night before. I called my oncologist to ask for advice. I was told to go into the infusion center for help. He recommended that I do so before going back to the ER. They took me to a room in the back and accessed my port. They gave me IV pain meds, but when my blood pressure reached 220 over 121 they called the emergency to bring a gurney. I was admitted to hospital after they brought my blood pressure down to some semblance of normal. They wanted to make sure I wasn't having a stroke or stomach ulcers. Which meant a bunch of tests. A CT scan, stomach x-ray, an ultrasound of my abdomen, an upper endoscopy, and a biopsy of my stomach. They found nothing. I stayed that time from Tuesday to Thursday. I was released Thursday night around 9:00 pm. I went into see Dr. El Rayes the next morning. He said since the tests that were performed found nothing, he could only logically assume that it was the cancer causing all the pain.

I had to let that information marinate a bit. That my cancer was causing pain even though there was no sign of cancer in that area. My body was so out of whack that there was pain for no reason. This cancer is a beast. I went back home and within hours of eating, the agony had come back. I went back to the ER where they stabilized me again and were going to release me, but my dad refused. He told them they needed to admit me. Which they did. I was there for another 5 days. So they could control my pain and vomiting. They did more tests and found nothing. But then I got pneumonia. Another setback. I couldn't get chemo until it was gone. So I got sent home with antibiotics. When those were finished, I finally was well enough. I knew getting chemo would help fight the pain. So I got prepared and hoped for the best.

I started my new chemotherapy drug. I had thought about it and realized that a six week break from chemo was not going to be beneficial moving forward. I was right. It was horrible. I'm in constant pain. Though it’s a different one than the one that took me to the ER and into the hospital for days. So I guess it’s good that the stomach pain is gone. I can't eat. When I do, I vomit uncontrollably. I'm persistently nauseous. I don't know how to exist feeling this way. I wonder if this is normal. I wonder if this is killing me. I wonder if I can do this. Be strong. I keep telling myself that. But I don't know if I can. This constant ruination is brutal. It's getting to the point that I can at times compartmentalize my emotion. If I can be objective about the pain and nausea, then I can be more affective in dealing with it. If only I could do that all the time. I keep wanting to forget that this disease wants to destroy me. Maybe if I don't pay attention to that part then it won't be true.

I think about the things I had heard about cancer before I had it. No one ever said that it hurt. You always heard things like 'so and so passed surrounded by family' or 'so and so was brave and fighting'. How come I never heard anyone say how much it hurts? Why isn’t that part spoken about? It’s such a weird thing to realize. What is it? Is it because the picture would be too difficult to see? What are we protecting by downplaying that very important fact? Cancer hurts so bad that it tests the very fiber of your being. It asks how important living is to you that you would endure the worst pain of your life for more time to live. Have you ever thought that about cancer? Not very pretty is it.

I found myself at the ER again about a week after this new chemo. I couldn’t stop vomiting, it had been 4 days of this, and I knew if I couldn’t stop that I would get dehydrated. I was alone at my condo in town at night. So I picked myself up and took myself to the ER. It was all I could do to get myself there. The stress of going was playing out as a full blown panic attack. As I signed in through my tears, I tried desperately to find some control of my emotions. The woman at the desk changed my life. She handed me tissues and said gently, “It’s going to be ok. Stop crying. You’re beautiful. You’re going to get the help you need now. “ They were the kindest words I’d ever heard. After doing a chest x-ray and an EKG, they got me back into a room fairly quickly. Once the ER doctor got to my room he asked me what I thought I needed. I told him fluids and anti nausea meds. He had seen my chart. He said that after being a cancer patient as long as I had, he thought I would probably know what I needed. He gave me what I asked for and discharged me. It was the easiest ER visit I’d ever had. I was so relieved. As I left I realized that this would not be the last ER visit or hospital stay. It was a sobering thought. But now that I’d come to terms with the fact that ER visits and hospital stays would be a way of life for me, it wasn’t so scary. Now it had become a tool to manage my curse.

The hardest part of all of this is not the incredible physical pain or the intense nausea. Or the loss of independence, my career, my life as I know it. It’s not the sleepless nights, the energy I used to have, or watching my body transform into something unknown. It's watching what it's doing to my family. Seeing my mother desperately trying to feed me. Because to her food is the great healer and cooking and gardening is what she does best. Watching my father trying to fix the unfixable. Seeing him organize my bills and talking almost daily to the hospitals and trying to make sure I travel so I can escape my brutal truth. Knowing my brother is trying to be there for me from so far away when there isn't anything more that he can do. My entire family is being torn into emotional shreds over something we have no power to change. We love each other so much and as much as it is our strength, that love is pain. A family's love cannot kill cancer, but neither could cancer ever kill a family's love.

I want my life back. I don't want to do this anymore. But I don't have a choice about that. All I have is what lies before me. And what I do have a choice about is this: I can feel sorry for myself, or I can rise. And there is no shame in the times that I fail to rise. Because when I fail, I still learn. And it hurts. Deeply. But I learn. These lessons teach me about what really matters. And what I’m really made of. And somehow I rise anyway. Then it tells me all sides. The ugly, the beautiful, the difficult, the reality. I get to see it all. And in the strangest way I’m ok with my path. Because I do find a way to make lemonade. I find the sweet to complement the sour. And in the end, if you don't make lemonade, all you've got left is lemons. And who only wants lemons?




"You either get bitter or you get better. It's that simple.You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you." ~Josh Shipp

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