Chemo on the Rocks
By SUSAN GUBAR
LIVING WITH CANCER
Susan Gubar writes about life with ovarian cancer.
“You have the power to choose your own toxicity,” one speaker told the audience at a course for ovarian cancer survivors in Indianapolis recently. A professor of obstetrics and gynecology, she was urging patients to weigh side effects from various chemotherapy agents and participate in the decision on which treatments would least harm their quality of life.
But as she spoke, I found myself thinking about my toxins of choice — scotch, red wine — and the advisability of drinking alcohol while on chemotherapy.
A quick Web search will tell you which chemicals — and which medications prescribed along with them — will cause adverse effects when combined with alcohol. With this warning in mind, a few years ago I consulted my oncologist, who assured me that I could drink anything in moderation. The power to choose my own toxins buoyed me up in theory, but in practice some forms of chemotherapy gave me mouth sores that made drinking painful or tainted a sip with a weirdly metallic taste. Even these drawbacks might not have stopped me, were it not for another grotesque side effect, one rarely mentioned to patients and hard to describe: anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable. Not all chemotherapies induce this zombie state of not-wanting, not-desiring, not-relishing, but a few do in some benighted people.
Perhaps only a great poet can convey the misery of anhedonia. One poem composed by Emily Dickinson is usually interpreted as an expression of baffled despair at the experience of dying or the onset of psychosis, but it also captures the life-in-death desolation that can be induced by some chemical agents, a posthumous condition barely illuminated by the words “depression” and “fatigue.” In this poem, “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain,” mourners tread inside the poet’s head, a service beats like a drum until her mind goes numb, a casket is lifted as her soul creaks, and the leaden boots escorting the box make space itself begin to toll. Wracked by these ominous sounds, Dickinson feels herself to be a solitary member of an alien race when a “plank in reason” breaks. She plummets down, finished, as is the verse, which concludes with the intimation of an unspeakable abyss in its final word: “then —.”
Cancer patients are often enjoined to fight cancer, but I reeled from the shock that cancer had initiated an invasive guerrilla war against me. When chemotherapy was enlisted to battle the cancer, my consciousness stood on the sidelines, stunned at the casualties I suffered. Between the attacks of cancer and the counterattacks of chemo, I dwindled to a scarred, mute no man’s land. Amid the rocks of wreckage, I tried to take a page out of my 4-year-old grandson’s book: “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” What I endured, however, was a wake that might conclude with drinks for the mourners but certainly not for the deceased.
How astonishing, then, that after the third recurrence, after my oncologist persuaded me to enlist in a trial with an experimental drug, I find myself and my appetites awake. As I choose between Johnnie Walker and cabernet, I recall the hilarity of a woman in chemotherapy when she recounted a discovery to our support group: Any tick stupid enough to drink her blood dropped down dead! Would the newly evolving forms of targeted medicine, like the one I’m being given in this trial, be as powerful?
Though I have no way of knowing if the pills will work, my spirits soar. Perhaps some of the other deadened desires will also revive. I rejoice — at the wanting itself, no less than at the prospect of clinking ice or beaded bubbles winking at the rim. Ogden Nash’s “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” — “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker” — nudges aside Dickinson’s verse.
No comments:
Post a Comment