by D. L. Scott
The nausea after my first chemo was about a thousand terms worse than anything I’d experienced before. I stayed up most of the night, crying and retching, my head pounding so hard, that I thought a malicious witch had put a curse on me.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I repeated to myself over and over again. “I’m not going to survive this. How can I carry on? What about my kids, my life? It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. Why me?”
The next day wasn’t much better. The headaches continued, pounding migraine like pains that would give me no peace and responded to no painkillers. I called the Cancer Center. “No headaches were not a normal side effect of chemo. Maybe it was just a coincidence?” It didn’t feel like a coincidence.
I studied the labels on the various drugs they had given me to combat the nausea. Bingo – one of the nausea drugs that had a “side-effect of possible headache.” Made it sound insignificant, but it wasn’t. It felt like a caveman had chosen me for his mate and had hit me over the head with his club before dragging me off to his cave. I stopped taking that drug, and within a few days my head, at least, was back to normal.
Once I nixed the pills, the headaches lessened, but the nausea still dominated the first week of the chemo cycle. On that week I could barely eat at all, just managed a few spoons of bland food at meal times.
Even in the following week after the nausea had subsided I didn’t really want to eat. Everything tasted strange and metallic. I’d always gained a lot of pleasure from the foods I enjoyed, and it made me extremely sad that foods I’d loved like sharp cheddar or dark chocolate now were way too severe for my palate. Would it ever come back? Would I ever enjoy food again?
I also learned from experience exactly why those cancer patients were so cheery on the day of their treatment. The treatment day for a cancer patient is usually their best day. For my first cycle of chemo (the most brutal) I was scheduled to come once every two weeks. The pattern was pretty much the same each cycle. I was more or less fine when I arrived at the Cancer Center. Then a few hours later the nausea would kick in.
Subsequently for the days until my next treatment I slowly started to recover until by the time I was ready to go back I felt almost fine. I remember joking with a nurse some months later. As she fumbled with my port to put in my IV, she asked how was I doing that day. “Fine,” I answered, “but you’re here to put a stop to that!”
About three weeks after my first treatment I started to lose my hair. I knew it was going to happen, but didn’t expect it to start so quickly. I had gone to the hairdressers a few days before I had started treatment.
In a burst of bravery I’d decided to have my long hair cut and gave my ponytail to Locks of Love, a charity that takes donated hair and makes it into wigs for children with Leukemia.
The hairdresser was the first person I told about my cancer outside of my immediate family. The girl nodded sympathetically and talked about all the cool hairstyles I could try after my treatment was over and my hair started growing back.
I nodded politely but didn’t really believe it. I could not imagine at this stage there ever being an end to the treatment which was laid out for the months ahead of me; the treatment that might not even work.
My hair loss was what finally made the whole thing real for my son Joey. Cancer was abstract; a bald mommy, not so much. I wore my wig (kindly donated from the Cancer Center) when I was out of the house, but at home, in the heat of the summer, despite my son’s discomfort, I needed my head to be bare. The wig was just too itchy. I compromised when his friends came over to play by putting on a headscarf.
As I said before, it’s amazing what you can get used to. Very quickly it all became routine – the treatments, the hair loss, the nausea. There were even moments of hilarity, like when my wig blew off while I was waiting at a bus stop one day. The look on the bus driver’s face was priceless.
Very slowly my fear subsided into something more manageable. I’d talked to other cancer patients, by then and survivors too. Breast cancer could be beaten. I also realized that I was luckier than some. I had a family to support me. I met a woman in the Cancer Center about the same age as me, with almost an identical diagnosis.
The difference was that she was on her own. There was no one to accompany her to the treatments and surgeries. No one to help at home. She had to try somehow between treatments and nausea to hold down her job, so that she could keep her insurance and continue coming to the Cancer Center.
The next round of chemo was easier, or maybe I just got used to it, and then the moment of reckoning - another round of tests to determine if it had worked. I held my breath and waited.
The toxic fluid that had been pumped into my veins for months now had been working its medical magic. Amazingly the lumps that had shown up like boulders on my first ultrasound were now all but gone, but still my oncologist was only cautiously optimistic.
I didn't understand. Surely it had worked. I felt the familiar flavor of fear rise up in my throat. I forced myself to swallow, to stay focused.
No, I didn’t want to have a mastectomy. Yes, I would take my chances with a lumpectomy and radiation, though I wondered what in the world they were planning to remove as there was nothing on the ultrasound.
The prep for my surgery was extremely painful. Time seemed to slow during those minutes of pain. I truly don’t know how long it all took, just that I was supremely glad when it was over and I was wheeled back downstairs to have my surgery.
I sank gratefully into the oblivion of anesthesia and awoke to the welcome news that the operation had gone well.
After the surgery came radiation, and then finally, nearly a year after I had first felt the lumps, I was done. The Cancer Center has a bell survivors ring when they complete their treatment. I rang that bell gleefully. I had beaten it – I had beaten my fear. I had beaten the cancer.
About the Author
Debbie Manber Kupfer grew up in the UK in the East London suburb of Barking. She has lived in Israel, New York and North Carolina and somehow ended up in St. Louis, where for the last 15 years she has worked as a freelance puzzle constructor of word puzzles and logic problems.
She lives with her husband, two children and a very opinionated feline. Her first novel “P.A.W.S.” was published in June 2013 and she’s currently working on a sequel. She believes that with enough tea and dark chocolate you can achieve anything! Connect with Debbie on her blog http://debbiemanberkupfer.wordpress.com/ or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DebbieManberKupferAuthor
About the Editor
“When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.”
- Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
Dara Ratner Rochlin is a freelance book editor and major grammar nerd, dating all the way back to elementary school. A voracious reader of all genres, you can find her blog/website at www.dararochlinbookdoctor.com. She can also be followed on twitter at @bookdoctordara
When not editing, she enjoys time with her family, the beach, and chocolate. She’d like to thank her husband Jeff, and her two wonderful children, Jason and Alyson, for all their support and love during the creation of this anthology.
She can be reached by email, at [email protected], and on Facebook as well at https://www.facebook.com/DaraRochlinBookDoctor.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Devil’s Man by K Webster
Sleep Tight by rJo Herman
Hunting Season by T.D. Harvey
The House in the Woods by Maria Sauerbrei
Shadows by D.L. Scott
The Collaboration: A Gothic Tale by Krista Redmayne
Eac
h Uisge by Kerry E. B. Black
A Testament to Finer Things by Laura K. Cowan
The Morrigan by Jack Darkness
Forbidden Child by S.M. Lowry
Sweaty Sheets & Sleepless Nights by Joi Miner
Our Lady of St. Raccoonus by Matt Lovell
The Beginning of the End by Tom Deady
The Nominee by BB Raven
Repeat Offender- A Fictional by Stance A. Bingham
George by D.K. Cassidy
The Tattoo by Michael Mill
Perfect Connections by Roxanna Mitchell
T209 by Shannon McLoud
The Gift by C. Lloyd Brill
All of Life is a Game by Adriel Reed
The Big C by Debbie Manber Kupfer
ABOUT THE EDITOR…Dara Ratner Rochlin
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
