When the voice talks, you listen

Dear Fran,

Today is a day you want to lie on the floor at the gym and cry. The hyper-flexiblity you bestowed on your children is long gone, tendons and muscles frozen from months of chemical barrage and lack of mobility. You feel like an alien in your own body. This is where you are now. This is the baseline.

The forest fire that raged through your life last year has its lasting effects, the greatest of which is the journey you now have to take to become whole again.

Be the woman you can be and find a path and a plan back to feeling fit and fantastic in your skin. Don't dwell in the blackened landscape. Find, gather and take in the elements that you need to bring those green shoots of life to the surface. You know what they are: love, dialogue, forward motion, physical contact, movement, positivity, strength. If you don't have them at the ready, seek them out. They are the things that make you thrive. Without them, you will fail.

It's too easy to watch the rock roll down the hill, not thinking you have to push it up again. This is not a choice. Don't even consider it one.

Love,
That voice in your head.

Ashen from the Inside

I wake up in the morning with a face that resembles the Laughing Buddha, except that I'm not laughing, just swollen and red from the steroids that have wrecked my sleep and made me edgy. I remember Mom looking like this too so I welcome the day with the sarcastic smile she used to give to say "this shit sucks" when we'd comment on the chemo.

Chemo fucking sucks.

Four days in and I can tell the difference already. The skin on my face has grown rough, I can feel the little hairs on my head starting to revolt. My breathing feels off and my scars hurt. I feel burnt from the inside out. I am in no way myself.

It's really hard not to despair right now, so newly on the edge of this phase, looking out 16 weeks and wondering how I am going to make it through this time. Maybe it will get easier (ha), maybe I am just going deep in this feeling right now, exploring it and making it my own before I put it aside and live through it. But I will say that I have never felt anything like this before in my life. And it's frightening.

But, as my friend Liz said tonight when I noted "chemo sucks ass" on my Facebook page: "Yes, it does. But then you are here. Healthy."

That's what I am trying to grasp on to tonight, the reality that I will come out of this healthy or somewhat like I was before this began. I hate my vanity, but I hate looking the way I look, feeling the changes in my body, feeling so hollow, ashen and carved out on the inside. I can't quite figure out how to pass the time, to mark the passage of this time, to check off the days and weeks coming up so that I can cling to it being over. I need something to physically manifest this experience to let me know where I am in the process. It just seems so long.

I guess there are things to look forward to...a wonderful sister in law getting married, a conference in San Francisco in October...little things that will mark the end time after this has come and gone. I need to set these markers up. I need to find the rock cairns along the way from women who have already traversed this path and can help me see the other side. I need to find the reason for the movement forward, every day.

Right now, I just feel like curling up and escaping for a few months.

Tonight I am off of the steroids for the first night, so here is to better sleep, a less puffy face in the morning, maybe a real Laughing Buddha to greet me as I walk out tomorrow. Here's to making it through. Here's to moving it forward.