Running and Life, or, Running versus Death
Sub-8 Mile's Battle-o-Rama
(maybe this story will, in some way, help someone you know; if so, that's cool. oh, and F Cancer.)
Chapter 25: Finish Line, Starting Line
sometime 2017
There’s dizzy disorientation, and then there’s this.
The world is warped. I’m outside, or somewhere. Each passing car goes by so slowly that I can see individual treads on the tires, and so quickly that in one instant it vanishes. The sun is a dark, dark orb in the dim, dim sky; the force of its radiant brilliance literally pushes me down to the ground. Sounds are bent. Crushing exhaustion crashes over me, a constant always-breaking wave at every moment.
I am taking it too far. Says my one doctor. Maybe don’t take all of the chemo. Probably no one has done this much before, not this total accumulated quantity.
My hands are numb. They tingle and sting.
Pills. Poison pills, derived from a poisonous plant that my ancestors knew in olde times.
The prescription is from my other doctor, who is out of state. So it’s up to me to decide. I keep filling the script and I keep emptying the bottle.
My ears have a nonstop screeching sound. My ears are filled with thick cotton that muffles the world around me. When people speak, I read their lips. Sometimes I jump, startled by an explosive screech that no one else can hear. My world has become so very loud, and so very quiet.
One of us is going to die. Me, or the cancer. I am making sure of it.
After everything, they told me I have to take the pills. They didn’t tell me this back when I was many-pounds-light, in a wheelchair, wearing a Captain America T-shirt to be ironic. They didn’t tell me when they finally yanked the rubber hose out of my chest on the count of three. I thought I was done. I didn’t know that there would be more months of more poison.
Time blurs. Between recovery and oblivion and recovery and oblivion, I swing. I empty one bottle of pills over weeks and then recover for weeks and then another bottle.
My feet are wooden, no sensation. Searing electricity burns my feet. Both, all the time.
Today’s office visit, the usual questions. Pain level … I don’t know. I can’t tell any more. It’s not applicable, or something like that. Fatigue … there is no answer; the word itself is a strange understatement. These questions don’t matter. They are written for other patients, who have things like “pain” and “fatigue”.
With each pill, I am killing my body. But “killing” is like “pain” and “fatigue” … not the right word, not a relevant idea.
I don’t think I’ll die, I tell my doctor. I’m going to almost die. These doses of toxic poison, over an extended period, are my … what? My path to not this. After I do what I am doing, no one will ever again tell me that this cancer is here. Either the cancer will not be here, or I will not be here to hear it.
What I thought I knew before about Commitment and Endurance was nothing.
My hair has grown back and fallen out and grown back and fallen out. Eyebrows. Eyelashes. Arms, legs, chest … but it doesn’t fall out any more. Now, I can take the chemo pills, and my hair stays. It’s weird hair -- wrong-multi-color, patchy, baby-soft-here and pubes-on-the-sides-of-my-head-there -- but it’s not falling out. What, am I a mutant now?
I’m getting immune to the poison, maybe. Nobody does this much chemo and grows hair. Maybe I’m getting stronger somehow. Maybe I’m getting superpowers.
I’m starting to wonder if I’ve had superpowers all along.
It’s almost summer. I run strides back and forth, gliding across a 150m field in the glorious sun. I finished the last of the pills a few days ago. It’s not possible to run strides. What’s happening right now, this isn’t defiance. It just is.
****
summer 2017
I groggily open my eyes. I’m in a hospital room, slowly waking. The surgeon enters.
He tells me what happened. They took longer in the O.R. than the time they had it reserved for. He and his team, the leading team for this specific surgery, internationally, had “never seen anything like it.”
When they cut me open, the surgeon explains, they saw all my organs “degraded and stuck together”. They gingerly cut each organ apart from the others. Taking all day, they barely managed to perform the procedure without my internals disintegrating on touch.
What they found was a nuclear war zone. Scores upon scores of dead, hardened, blackened scar tissue that once had been vibrant bundles of tumorous cells.
I had scorched my earth, and melted my insides. My enemy? Completely f***ing torched.
****
late fall 2017
The brown leaves are, presumably, crunching. I only hear a distant whoosh as I walk the wooded trail.
This is my first outing in a while. Multiple trips to the ER, blood pressure skyrocketing, bulging abdomen filled with fluid.
I’m wearing a pair of old running shorts, which are now extra large and baggy on me, and a beat-up pair of XC flats because for some reason they don’t make my feet hurt as much as other shoes.
“What kind of birds are those?” asks my hiking buddy.
“What birds?” I look around, the trees and leaf-littered hillside swirling in my distorted vision.
“That. Wait … that, there. That sound right there.”
“I don’t hear anything,” I say, puzzled. We look at each other, both confused. Then we realize it’s the hearing damage.
We hike on. It’s just an easy stroll on a mildly rolling trail, but it’s a hike for me. I’m loving it on this unseasonably warm day. My feet burn like heck with every step, I’m about to fall down from dizziness every dang minute, and apparently I can’t hear s***, but I am having a great time.
Well, ok. I am trying to tell myself that I’m having a great time. What’s really happening is that the world is now weird and I am some sort of broken. I won the war, but with costs.
Now, I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know what I can do.
We come to a straight, flat stretch of trail.
“Hold on,” I say. “Wait here, would you? I’ll go down there a ways, take off my shirt, and head back to you. Take my picture, ok?”
****
2018
I am tired. I have doubts. Fears. Will I always be this exhausted? Is my mind forever foggy?
I also have a photo of myself, wobbly and weak, fresh scar from sternum to shorts, grinning ear to ear as I run along a wooded trail on a glorious autumn day, newly cancer free, barely over a year after it took me forty-five minutes to walk a quarter mile.
One of these days, I’ll step onto a track and see if I can do 4 laps without stopping. Maybe next year. It’ll probably be tough, with burning feet and scarring in my lungs.
When I eventually get out there and try a mile, it's going to hurt. That's ok. I will always recover.