Signs of hope and promise are all around. You just need to be open to the possibilities.
The morning of my first chemo treatment there was a rainbow over our house. In many cultures, rainbows have a spiritual meaning of hope, divine presence, and promise. I am always on the lookout for signs that my life is on the right track and have received many over the years. For me, this particular rainbow was a sign of hope. I took it as a reminder that you can not have rainbows without rain.
This message was a beautiful one to embody as I headed towards the infusion center. When you are in the thick of a challenging and uncomfortable situation, it is really hard to see anything else around you, and it sometimes feels impossible to remember that there are brighter days ahead. When I think of the many steps still ahead of me on this journey, a whole year of treatments, it can be easy to get bogged down in the heaviness of it all. But seeing a magical rainbow that morning felt like such a sign from the universe. A beautiful sign that storms pass and the light will shine again.
And over the last two and a half weeks since my chemo treatment, I have needed to be reminded of that very idea a couple of times. Chemo is hard on your body. It is a gnarly drug and I have never experienced anything like it. You can feel your body trying to figure out what is happening as it works its way through you. The actual day of chemo was fine, I seemed to tolerate all the drugs well. And there are a lot of drugs. Steroids and benadryl and an anti-nausea medication that they injected me with to help mitigate the reactions I could have to the immunotherapy and chemo. But the aftermath of the treatment was not great. Once I stopped taking the dexamethasone two days after my chemo treatment, I became pretty fatigued and felt heavy. My mouth was dry, food tasted weird and I did not have much appetite. When I did eat, my stomach was not very happy. These symptoms lasted for about 8 days and right as they started to get better, I got a cold, which put me down for the count for another week. And during this time, it felt really challenging to remember that I would eventually feel better and I would get to the other side of this stronger and more resilient.
Even with all of the side effects I encountered, there are so many I avoided and I am grateful for that (the packet of side effects I received at the Dr.’s was a whole novel in itself!) I have been doing a lot of things to support my body in preparation for chemo that I believe have helped me. Acupuncture and supplements, as well as a fasting mimicking diet that has been proven in some studies to mitigate some of the chemo side effects. The idea behind it is to eat a very low calorie diet of mostly broths and vegetables that will “slow down” the growth of your healthy cells and allow the chemo to target and kill the cancer cells that rapidly divide. So for 72 hours around the time of chemo, I was on this protocol. What I noticed about my body is that it felt like it did not have to work overtime to clear out fats and toxins from food I was consuming, so it could focus on clearing out the chemo toxins much more efficiently.
I also am cold capping to see if I can save some of my hair (which is a whole process in itself and one I will write about on another day) and during the taxol portion of my treatment, I am wearing ice gloves and booties to prevent the possible side effect of neuropathy. So although the actual chemo day was a fine day all things considered, I did spend it as a hungry, cold, popsicle! But I can do hard things, especially when there is a method to the madness. In this case, to mitigate side effects of chemo and help my body get through it a bit easier
Life can be hard sometimes. There are uncomfortable moments and sometimes it is hard to want to get up and keep going. Sitting in these moments of hardship, letting yourself feel the sadness and the pain, and even taking the time to grieve the life that you had before everything shifted is a powerful place to be. Because only when you fall apart does the opportunity to put yourself back together again present itself. And you can choose what pieces of yourself you let go of, and what pieces you hold on to and build upon. So far, the chemo has been the hardest part of this journey for me to mentally power through because the side effects from the medicine make you feel so physically awful. But I have faith in the journey and I know the storm will pass, the clouds will part, and there will be a rainbow shining brightly on the other side.
