The Routine

           The ritual usually begins sometime in the morning. Sitting in room lined with chairs, not unlike a strange barber shop, I wait for my turn to meet with any one of the many nurses milling about. A plastic flower which looks like it belongs on a trucker’s dashboard next to a dancing hula lady bobs up and down on the window pane just to my left, offering whatever cheer it can in the otherwise sterile and beige-ridden area. Finally, I am wished a good morning and asked how I am doing. Pleasantries exchanged, I remove my shirt to reveal the small round bulge on my upper chest which marks the place where my port was installed. I thought with half-amusement when I had this access point put in that I looked like a less cool and certainly less shiny version of Iron Man. After inserting the IV needle, the nurse takes the blood he or she needs and tells me to have a good day, leaving the tubing dangling beneath my shirt for later use. In the following hour, I meet with my hematologist, a wonderfully friendly Indian woman named Dr. Reddy, and we discuss my blood counts and how my treatment is progressing. Another hour or so separates when I have to appear at the Infusion Center, and we typically take the time to grab lunch in the hospital’s cafeteria.

Once at the Infusion Center, we arrive at a room not much larger than a double-wide closet. Two chairs rest unassumingly in the corners while a TV offers the only apparent means of distraction opposite. I take an initial communion of small white pills from a paper cup and wait for half an hour or so while they take their positions to wage war against the waves of nausea inevitably on the way. A friendly nurse then takes her place and attaches a large syringe filled with the unmistakable red liquid that is Adriamycin (affectionately called “the red devil”) to my IV. Perpetually checking to make sure the toxic substance doesn’t escape the confines of my veins, the administration only takes about fifteen minutes or so. The same procedure is repeated for the Bleomycin and Vinblastine, only these liquids appear more innocuously clear. Finally, the Dacarbazine is brought forth in a plastic bag with a green covering and is set to drip steadily through the IV for anywhere between an hour or hour and a half. Once completed, we pick up our things and head home, our dues paid for the next two weeks. And so it is, again and again like the instructions on a shampoo bottle: lather, rinse, repeat. A steady, unrelenting attack: this is the battle plan against the enemy known as Hodgkin’s.

That much was easy enough to establish. I simply have to follow the procedures prescribed and then go about my business. The real challenge was trying to figure out what “going about my business” even looked like now. Having been a student basically nonstop for the past fifteen years of my life, I had always developed a routine for myself in order to stay up with my schoolwork and any other extracurriculars I might be involved in. Everything had its place, everything had its allotted time, and thus I moved forward with clear goals and objectives in mind. Now, however, I suddenly found myself suspended in a weird, amorphous existence where I no longer had academic requirements to fill or even employment obligations to attend to. I was simply taking time off to “get better.” I can tell you right now, definitively and decidedly, that sitting around and “getting better” does not exactly fill the hours of the day. Sure, it was nice taking a break from the hustle and bustle of a college kid’s breakneck-paced life, but after a couple of weeks or so, a creeping question worked its way to the forefront of my mind, “What do I do with myself?”

We all value the constantly elusive and ever so sweet commodity that is free time in the small doses in which we can find it, but here I was with nothing but free time on my day to day diet, and I began to feel bloated and sluggish like someone who has taken to eating only desserts for every meal. Whereas I had been driven to achieve while in school, I now felt directionless and ineffective, spending many days doing little more than watching TV or reading a book. I would rouse myself on some occasions with declarations of “I’m going to go out and get something done today!” only to realize that I really didn’t have anything to do out and get done. All at once, an opportunity to go to the grocery store or renew a car’s registration became the pinnacle of a day’s productivity, and I would seize the chance to feel like I had accomplished something worthwhile. Granted, not all days were like this simply because many times I would feel too poorly to do anything more than lay around in my living room, and during those times I was extremely grateful for the down time.

My situation seemed incurably drab, and I began to dread the months I would have to spend in this stale, uninspiring limbo. At some point, I can’t say exactly when, I took a step back and looked at my circumstances in a different light, however. Life, I realized, comes in seasons, both varied and unpredictable. In the season of my life as a college student, I had been hardwired with the go, go, go mindset that is necessary to survive and succeed in such an environment. Now, however, I was in a season of my life where all of that was stripped away and I had only the obligation to wake up each morning and continue breathing. And while not fast-paced or even very exciting, it was unmistakable how important this time was, not just for my health, but for my wellbeing as a person. I am learning that adversity comes in all shapes and sizes and even disguises itself in clever costumes to make us think that it is not adversity at all. All we can do, all we can ever do, is pick up the burdens placed before us and learn how to grow from the steps we take under their weight. Of all the trials I imagined that would accompany battling cancer, I never guessed that boredom and restlessness would loom over me just as ominously as the physical side-effects. Yet once I recognized them for what they were, I found myself better equipped to embrace them as tools for learning and not just trivial annoyances. And while I cannot quantify or foresee what the benefits of weathering such trials might be, I only know I must weather them nonetheless.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The Plan

          Though chemotherapy was not a subject that I had given much consideration before this time, I think I was under the impression that the term was descriptive of a singular thing, as if all cancer patients received the same treatment regardless of their respective ailments. I quickly discovered the misguidedness of this preconception, however, and instead realized that the type of chemo prescribed by a physician varies in both duration and toxicity based on the particular cancer a patient has. In my case, the most standard approach to treating stage 2 Hodgkin’s is a chemo regimen concisely known as ABVD. As one can pretty easily guess, the four letters stand as an acronym for the four chemicals used in the therapy. A: Adriamycin, B: Bleomycin, V: Vinblastine, D: Dacarbazine. After learning these names, I instantly formed a love/hate relationship with them. Love, for the good they were meant to do against the cancer; hate, for the cost they demanded from my body in return.

            As anyone slightly acquainted with chemo knows, the real bugger about the whole thing is its indiscriminate nature. Yes, it is designed to attack the rapidly dividing cancer cells in your body, but it doesn’t take the time to figure out which rapidly dividing cells are cancer and which are say, the cells that constitute your immune system or the cells responsible for producing your hair. It just goes like a rabid dog, snapping up anything that meets its unfortunately broad criteria. Every two weeks for six months was my initial sentencing. That was, of course, if the PET scan after two months of treatment came back clean, meaning the cancer was responding well. While engaging in something that can generally be regarded as less than fun for half of a year did not send me into giddy fits, I reasoned that if I could suffer through the effects of this thing growing inside my chest for the better part of four years, I could stand going through a little more to be rid of it. The doctors also recommended an additional month of radiation following chemo, but we haven’t landed the plane on that one yet. There are still pros and cons to be weighed.

            So there was the plan, plain and simple enough. Yet at the time, the big question that still remained to be answered was could I remain in school while I did chemo? Of course, I tried to squeeze every bit of optimism from the doctors that I could; I just needed one of them to say “Oh yeah, no big deal. You can stay in school and handle this other crap no problem,” and I would have taken that as my license to forge ahead on my road to the increasingly evasive goal of graduating in four years. Unfortunately, no one was willing to offer anything more than a measly “Well, you might be okay, but don’t count on it.” My inner super student slumped in defeat. Nothing seemed more repulsive to me than to abandon the Auburn ship for at least one semester while my body decided how it was going to react to prescribed doses of poison. I wasn’t just giving up my role as a student, but also my leadership position in a student volunteer organization and my job at the university’s writing center, both of which I enjoyed immensely. Cancer was already going to take my health away; was it too much to ask to keep these other things that I valued so highly? Though it pained me, I could not in good conscience throw myself back into my busy student life without knowing what condition I would be in for the next several months. Like a little kid having his candy pried from his hungry fingers, I relinquished my hope that I would return to school for the fall semester.

            I have never been particularly good at goodbyes. Perhaps somewhere deep down I believe that if I refuse to recognize something is over, it won’t be. Despite my aversion, however, I said goodbye to many of my friends at Auburn during the one weekend I spent there while I collected my things to come home. I loathed doing it, but I said my farewells with an underpinning note of optimism and anticipation that my absence would only be temporary and that I would return better than when I left. To this day I don’t know for sure how long my educational hiatus will last, but I continually hope for a sooner rather than later prognosis. So that was the plan: fight one battle before returning to the other. It made the most logical sense, and it was in accordance with all the voices of caution and reason that only wished me the best. Even so, that didn’t keep me from hating it all the same.