I got white dog crap in my belly, then you lay this shit on me...

It all comes down to treatments...


Immediately, almost instinctively, we imagine nausea, vomiting, hair loss, weight loss, fatigue. Images flash before our eyes like the camera toys for kids where you slide in a film strip and click through to see the images. There's the Eiffel Tower. There's the Sphinx. The Pyramids of Egypt. Machu Picchu. Statue of Liberty. The Great Wall of China. Except these pictures are altogether more sadistic: We watch ourselves wasting away in a hospital bed. Running to the bathroom to throw up. Looking down into our hands to see our hair falling out. Darkness and death.

What does it feel like?

It's about as bad as you can conjure up in your head, and then make it a lot worse.


My frist treatment was filled more with anxiety than vomitus. I was worked up and scared and nervous. What would it feel like? Would it hurt? How long would it take?

Will I still be myself afterwards?


Outcome: uneventful. I got nauseous and was a little tired in the days following the treatment. But I did not think it was that bad. So, I went in to the second treatment thinking, "Maybe I'm just lucky. Maybe the chemotherapy just doesn't affect me in the way it does other people." Stranger things have happened.

I was wrong. The second treatment hit me like a baseball bat to the back of the head. I was OUT! I was in bed for a couple of days straight. I couldn't eat. I couldn't drink. My tongue felt like a piece of sand paper. I was dizzy. I couldn't open my eyes. I felt like I had fallen away from the world, just my bed and I.


The doctor told me I HAD to eat during treatments, and I explained to him that eating would be lovely and I enjoyed doing it, but not when swallowing would be concurrent with vomiting. My solid food diet was suspended and I was relegated to drinking Gatorade, Boost, and Ensure. I had all the flavors I wanted... I still couldn't drink them. I drank them so often that the smell of those drinks nearly made me vomit.


Before I was diagnosed and began treatment I weighed a stout 175 pounds, which was normal for me. In one month's time, I weighed only 145 some-odd pounds. I lost over 30 pounds and looked like a walking corpse. I had not weighed that light since 7th or 8th grade. I grew out a beard to hide how frail and gaunt I had become. For my two year anniversary, I had to wear a jacket from 7th grade, because I looked like a ten-year old in his father's suit.


Then the hair started to fall out. Now, I have always had a ridiculously, unnecessary abundance of hair. The range basically went from the top of my head to the tips of my toes without a break. As such, though my hair fell out, I still had remnants, though they tended to be sporadic and non-uniform. My eyes brows vanished (though the existed in some purgatorial state that made it seem as if I was waxing my eyebrows into a shape indicative of the St. Louis Arch). Similarly, my eyelashes disintegrated. Tears poured forth from my eyes in the slightest of winds. Even my nose hairs disappeared and nose-bleeds were a plenty. You don't realize the beauty of design in the human body until those things are robbed from you. My chest hair thinned (I spent the majority of my life until that point wishing that it woudl go away, and I found myself missing each strand of organic velcro that had once garnished my body). I found that it was extremely surprising how warm all that hari had kept me when I had it, and how ridiculously cold I was now that I no longer had it.


A lot of people have tried to figure out how chemotherapy "feels." I cannot seem to really put it into words that give it justification. All I can say is that the physical ailments and the torture (and it is indeed torture) that your body faces is less than nothing compared to the mental agony that you have to endure. I will never be able to fully express how you feel physically during treatments; it's incomparable to anything else I have ever experienced. And I hope that you will never know what I mean. I can only try and put you in some type of mind frame to try and see if you can begin to get the mental strain you undergo.


The only way to save your life is to engage in an act that while possibly giving you a chance to become better, simultaneously threatens to kill you. And you must bring yourself to the hospital willingly to sit down in that chair and have them hit you with the hard stuff, knowing beforehand how crappy you are going to feel and knowing that the side effects only get worse the further along you go.

But there is an African saying:
"Rain beats a leopard's skin, but it does not wash out the spots."