The Beast

Two best friends, three days, one chance to connect. I met Annika in Los Angeles for the weekend. I’ve been in Hawaii for six months. My universe has consisted of tourist-packed Waikiki and a retreat that resembles Jurassic Park. I felt the relief that comes from being surrounded by old friends who knew me long before I became Chemo Boy. Hawaii has been a compromise. It presents an ideal environment for someone in need of a ‘longer term’ recovery solution to nearly four years of chemotherapy. Its climate, its gentility, its clean air, its pace welcome the weary and beckon me to rest. But it came without the companionship of those who know me best. It was a pilgrimage, an homage to the isolation of chemotherapy, and a chrysalis.

A sizzling LA afternoon found Annika and I backed up in rush hour traffic, inching towards Pasadena, running an errand. The traffic was tedious, but the chance to talk was invaluable. I confessed to Annika how frightened I am. Sure the unpredictability of my future scares me, of course it always has. But rounding the two-year mark for this treatment, with an additional year and a half of therapy left, my second wind has both come and gone, as has my third and fourth. And while the finish line may be vaguely in sight somewhere in the future, I’m nowhere near that point yet. I wake up feeling miserable almost every day from these toxic drugs, and after two years, I find it hard to remember what anything else feels like.

Annika suggested that perhaps part of my fear is actually a fear of becoming better again. As she said the words, I hunched forward in my seat and sobbed. She held my hand and let my demons drive for a bit. It’s the cruelest joke, to be forced to endure this endless misery, and to have to make peace with that in order to survive. I reimagined chemotherapy as an intimate force, a lover of sorts, in order to survive. I had to. Right or wrong, sensical or non, it was my way. Either it would kill me, or I would understand it to be something very different than it first appeared, a friendly force. And I survived. But two years later, the routine of illness has demanded that I continue to lie at peace with this beast. The irony? I’m equally terrified of losing it as I am of it killing me. I don’t know who I am without this monster. I have difficulty remembering who I was before. I have more difficulty imagining who I will be after.

Annika, ever the firecracker, leapt in her seat and reminded me that it is still a beast, and while peace must be made the goal, for myself and my loved ones, is to be rid of it. Be angry with it, be frustrated to all hell with it. Point to the door and tell it to get out. Don’t ever stop fighting it.

It’s tremendously difficult to let the gravity of my situation drift out into cyber space. I’ve been lying with a terrifying beast for two years. Friendly as it occurs at times, it is still the beast on my back, burdening me with its terrible weight. And I hate it. I hate it. I loathe it so much I can’t even begin to describe the depth. This is hell, folks. And I don’t know what more to say.