To Your Health

I’m on a diet. Several weeks ago I met with an incredibly helpful nutritionist to discuss what I thought would be balanced nutrition in the midst of chemotherapy. Instead, she suggested a fairly radical departure from what I assumed was ‘good’ for me. Top of her list of priorities was countering, balancing and cleansing the poisonous toxins that have been coursing through my body for over a year now. When the body is deprived of the essential minerals it needs to stabilize a toxin present in your system and get rid of it, it stores it instead. The build-up of toxins in a normal body can lead to erosion and damage to your organs, bones, etc. Imagine how all of this is affected by the presence of chemo drugs! Over the years, as the build-up continues without essential minerals (few of us have as many as we need) to stabilize, the erosion makes your body much less capable of fending off other diseases, other cancers even. I’ve lived for a while with the dreaded feeling that while I may have survived leukemia, the damage caused to my body by both it and chemotherapy could haunt me for the rest of my life, constantly impeding on my well-being. Imagine how it feels, then, to have someone explain in detail how to give myself a chance to have energy and vitality for the rest of my life. I didn’t need to think about it twice. I told her I’d give it a shot.

Every day I swallow whole cloves of garlic. I drink shots of wheatgrass (one of the most potent sources of minerals). I eat sprouts. I juice vegetables. I make a mixture of coconut oil, raw honey and this green powder called spirulena that, when mixed together, looks something akin to diarrhea. I close my eyes and slurp it up all day. I snack on raw nuts and avocados. I take a knife and hammer out to our balcony each afternoon, crack open a coconut and dream of Africa and the Caribbean while I drink the sweet, warm milk.

It requires an enormous amount of discipline to reconfigure a mind that has been wired one way for years. I joke that I’m asking myself at age 25 to do what most people wait to start doing until they’re perhaps into their fifties. 25 is the age of indestructibility. You can stay out till 4am every night, live on redbull and twizzlers and not give it a second thought. I don’t drink, I go to bed around ten pm each night. I avoid refined sugar and fast food like I avoid people with mullets. Forgive me if I have difficulty relating to most people my age. My circumstance has demanded that either I sit back and accept my situation and the damage it implies, or I be proactive and take on my healing myself. I remember what my favorite nurse, Gigi, told me right before my first chemo treatment the night I was diagnosed. “We’ll be working to get rid of this cancer in your body,” she whispered. “But there is so much we can’t do in here, so much that is up to you.” I understand so much more clearly what she was trying to tell me a year later. I want a life twenty years from now that is rich and full of energy and vibrancy and liveliness. Last year, I wanted to survive. This year, I want to flourish. So bottoms up. Here’s to my health.

Anger Management

I have anger issues. This became painfully obvious last night when I woke up at two in the morning from a startling dream. I was in a doctor’s office. A team of doctors in long white coats came in to assess my anger level. Their method was simple: poke, prod and provoke me to my breaking point. Different doctors were assigned different tactics. While one began jabbing me in my nauseous stomach, another was busy with a slide show dissecting my departure from the Mormon church years ago. All the while, a third criticized my play, Rain Falls, worse than the harshest New York Times review could. It worked. I finally leapt from the examination table and vented my deep wrath at the first person to come into view. Trouble is, at the moment it happened to be a loved one who had entered the room unsuspectingly. I woke up, salt tears staining my pillow, the bitter taste of rage in my mouth.

Several days ago, a friend of mine asked if I could pinpoint what I am most angry about. I responded that I was angry to be stuck here in Salt Lake City, a rather brilliant, if not humbling stroke of dramatic irony by the gods. The resentment has felt palpable for some time. If not for chemotherapy, I suspect I’d be moving forward in my career, perhaps traveling again. In a time in my life that felt defined by momentum, I’ve been forced to slow down, almost to a screeching halt, and wait. Wait, while it feels as though the world around me continues rushing forward at that blinding pace I remember matching only a year ago.

It’s a ridiculous thing to be angry with really, a city. In truth, I’m not trapped. There are no chains keeping me tied to the Wasatch Mountains. When I look deeper, I can acknowledge that the feeling of imprisonment has nothing to do with my physical location. It is my physical state.

I wake up each morning in this body. I walk slowly, I lie down, I get up when I can, I exercise only if I have energy. Every second of every day, I am confronted by my limitations. I am so angry that my body can’t do what it could before. I am so angry that my energy is limited, and my strength wanes. I am angry that I can’t climb a mountain I want to, that I can’t visit a place I want to. I am angry that chemotherapy keeps me from many of the things I love most in life, and makes others (like food) feel entirely unsatisfying.

The first step to moving beyond anger is confronting it, right? I woke from my dream realizing there is no one, nothing I can be angry with. My rage, for lack of a better target, is misdirected at the things that are actually helping me heal. I can’t direct it inward either, because my body, in a fragile state, seems to wear both my self love and self hate fairly visibly. So at the end of the day, I sit with my anger, not knowing how to dispel it. I don’t want this anger to fester in me. I don’t want to let it consume me. But until I can admit to myself just how angry I am, how real it is, and how strong a hold it has on me, I can’t begin to let it go.