By Cathy Smith

Even though I’ve never been a boxer, I am on a first-name basis with the saying, “Down for the count.” Chemotherapy treatment had KO’ed me, and I lay on my bed the color and shape of a lettuce wrap. I was careful not to say, “I quit” too loudly because my husband, a doctor, and my mother, a mom, would have pushed me back in the ring again with that stupid story about the little engine that could. My daughter, a homeopath, would have taken the opportunity to point out the limits of Western medicine, and the familiar Andrew Weil vs. Jonas Salk debate would have plagued the household again.

I like to think that I keep peace by wisely incorporating both points of view into my treatment. The scales may have tipped for a moment toward a New Age, body-mind connection when I channeled the cries, “I can’t take this anymore!” and, “If someone doesn’t turn down that radio, I’m going to lose my will to live!” I’d like to think that someone with some real listening power was alerted.
Something had to give. I wasn’t going anywhere and the chemo nurse threatened to give me a transfusion if I continued to run myself down.

Run myself down? I hadn’t touched my car keys in days. Telling the chemo nurse that her toxic product was causing my collapse was like bargaining with a referee. My counts showed that my red and white blood cells, devoted warriors against the Big C, were collapsing, delivering threats of inviting in unwanted germs and viruses. I felt like Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, driving the forces forward into slaughter.

Just as I was about to call off the next round of chemotherapy, the No-Can-Do signal was intercepted by some startling new lab results: The Cancer was shrinking! My cancer score card, known as tumor markers, had shriveled from the all-time high of 68 to a mere 14.7. After 12 years of ongoing treatment, I was once again beating metastatic breast cancer to a pulp. Down to the bone, the metastases were shrinking. The jubilant news spread through my neurotransmitters like Aretha Franklin belting out “R-e-s-p-e-c-t!”

Launched from my bed, I called all the people that I could think of that deserved good news. It was also a way of putting myself back into my old life. My mind opened to fantasies of travel, eating out, shopping, working. But then my body reminded me of my real status, “Hey you lettuce wrap, back to bed!” Therein lies the rub. In order to stay healthy, I had to maintain my weekly chemotherapy.

There is no real remission for metastatic breast cancer that has spread to every bone. There are moments, as the week takes you further away from chemotherapy, that are almost normal. Every few months, when your body is saturated and you can’t handle any more weed whacker, you are given a vacation. In the past, these vacations, although worthwhile, have always resulted in more tumor sites. So you learn to live and you learn to die at the same time.

I’ve had to learn to make extraordinary choices about quality over quantity of life. My “vacations” away from chemo are crammed with loving the good things in life, like sharing a carefree month in California with my grandchildren, while the cancer goes unchecked. Saying goodbye has become a way of life between compressed cycles of chemotherapy.

I think that if I really get good at this unusual rhythm of life, and I’m not quite there yet, I can learn to enjoy every sick day. Every once in a while I find myself feeling more alive with each quiet minute than I was in my old energized life. These moments seem to cluster around just being alive while my life reshapes itself once more.

Learning to live with illness is kind of like doing the Hokey Pokey. You put different parts of yourself in and shake it all around, and then you put those same parts of yourself out again and shake it all around. You continue to do this with every single part of yourself until you are spent. And then, with a little circle dance, right at the end, you end up singing, “That’s what it’s all about!”

Cathy Smith lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband Neil Sapin.

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