The Beauty, The Beast

The Beast is taking my eyebrows.

Spoiler alert: The Beast is chemo.  And my body is not tolerating The Beast well at all.  As you know, I already had to delay one round (the last one) because The Beast tanks my platelets, and they are not rebounding to an acceptable level within the three weeks between treatments.  The last time we delayed, we tried again in five days, and they were still below normal, but in the range of acceptable for chemo and so I had it.

We went in today for round four of six...and my platelets were too low once again.  The bizarre thing is that my initial reaction was to be disappointed in my body.  Like...chemo sucks, but other people's bodies (O.P.P.) tough it out all the time!  Is my body not "strong enough" to push through or tolerate chemo?  Should I be concerned?

But something brought me back around.  I spotted the "Chemotherapy Drug Spill Kit - Emergency Response Pack."  This stuff is so potent that the spilling of it merits an emergency response and safety precautions to clean it up, but it is injected directly into a port in my chest that feeds directly to my jugular vein??

No wonder my body is like WTH?!  I have asked a lot of this body: to grow humans, nourish them for many years - sometimes exclusively and around the clock - to tolerate my dietary whims and bad decisions, to overcome multiple rounds of anemia, to currently deal with vertigo, to work a demanding job and commute for hours a day...and now I want it to process poison and bounce back in less than three weeks?

Of course, other people's bodies do all that and still bounce back after chemo, but I think I will give my body a break, if it needs a little more time to heal.

And so The Beauty.  The Beauty is that while my body has asked for a longer period of time to recover, I will get to do a series of things that were going to be off the table or extraordinarily difficult as of this morning.  My oncologist is so great and understanding, that she encouraged me to take an extra week, because delaying one week as planned would have meant missing my son's birthday party, his birthday celebration at school, and a trip to my company's headquarters next week for the Legal Department's Diversity & Inclusion Business Council annual strategy meeting.  I was prepared to have to miss that one if I wasn't feeling up for it, but now I won't have to.  My oncologist assured me that delaying one extra week would not prevent me from being cured, and even better: it might give my platelets a chance to get high enough (pre-chemo levels), that we will not have to delay again before infusion five or six.

This does mean that surgery isn't happening in 2019.  It means I won't be done with this horrible phase until December 10th now, barring further delays.  It means that my Type A personality will be horribly challenged with the unknown yet again, wondering if I will be healed from surgery enough to make family vacation plans.  But my doctor saw my concerns, and understood them, and assured me that everything after chemo could have some flexibility.

And when I told the kids that I couldn't have my medicine today, and therefore I would not be sick for the next week and a half leading up to James's birthday, they cheered.  I think we all needed this recovery break.  The Beauty.