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Sarahthequeen05

I am a spunky 25-year-old living in a suburb of Tampa. I was relocated here with my husband of 2 years from western North Carolina when the Air Force decided that we were needed in sunny Florida! I had almost all the best times of my life at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, the oldest women's c...

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A Body Good

Sarah Davis-Harwood

I’ve decided that I don’t give my body enough credit.  I’m more ok with it now than ever but I still bitch about it in my head.  A lot.  Sometimes I wish I could go back to the way it was when I was little, pretty much any age prior to 12. 

I used to run around in tights and a leotard in front of strange parents I didn’t know in ballet class and competitions and recitals and those god-awful Christmas parades.  I wouldn’t do that now if you paid me.  (Well, depending on how much you paid me, maybe.)

When I was tee-ninsy, I used to play this game where I wore nothing but underwear and a skirt made up of a bunch of my mom’s scarves all tied together, and I hid in this palm tree that we had in the living room and leaped out at unsuspecting people and pretended I was queen of the jungle and I had captured intruders.  Topless and fearless. (Except for that day when I found the brown recluse, not so fearless then.)

Do you remember?  Do you really remember what it was like to be so cool with your body that you never even thought about it unless you scraped your knee or got a papercut?  Do you remember when you couldn’t give two craps about your hair as long as it stayed out of your face so you could run around in the yard without running into trees?  Do you remember when you ate what you wanted when you were hungry because this seemed like normal behavior?

I only vaguely remember it and it wasn’t that long ago.  I dread to think about how much I won’t remember about my childhood when I’m 97.  I wish I’d had the presence of mind to appreciate it before I sprouted boobs and had to wear a bra and started shaving my legs. 

Seriously, the leg hairs weren’t that big of a deal.  They were fine and downy and clear; you couldn’t even see them unless I was wearing my black ballet tights, which is why I started shaving in the first place.  Little did I know that shaving that one time would lead to a lifetime of icky, sharp stubble that was nothing like the hairs I was trying to get rid of in the first place, (not to mention a loss of blood and a scar on my left shin).

My body can do wonderful things.

Every other week I ritualistically poison it to the point that people over age 50 have to have proportionately smaller doses than I get because my dose, (even for a woman of the same build and necessity), would die from my chemo.  (I know this because I discussed it with the doc when we were talking about how it was taking me longer and longer after each chemo to recover.)

So, I have really nasty fatigue and muscle weakness and nausea off and on for a week (but it’s totally treatable with meds), and food tastes weird for 3 or 4 days, and I lost most of my hair and my nails have funny horizontal lines on them, but that’s it.  And if I were my mother’s age it would kill me.  Pretty remarkable, huh?

And it’s all because my body is freaking smart as hell. 

I didn’t know what to do or expect from that first chemo, and my body didn’t either.  That was the time I threw up for almost the entire 2 weeks and lost 11 pounds in 8 days.  I was afraid that it would be like that the entire 6 months of treatment.  But, my body wasn’t worried at all.  It brushed it off like it was nothing and learned from it, and 2 weeks later, it knew exactly what to do with all that shit in my bloodstream.

Chemotherapy is nasty stuff and can obliterate the small veins in your arms.  They pretty much just give up and collapse because they are not stupid and don’t want to be near any of the nastiness.  I have mentioned my port before, and even though sometimes it bothers me (random arm tingling from nerves being squashed), I’m glad I have it.  It’s a little circular disc, about the size and thickness of 3 quarters stacked together. 

If you move your hands along your collarbone on your right, just to the edge of where the collarbone ends and go down, diagonally towards your right arm about 4 fingers, that’s where it sits.  There is a pink scar about an inch and a half long just above it where they inserted it.  You can clearly see it under my skin, because this is one spot on my miraculous body that is very skinny.  (They make ports in all shapes and sizes for all different shapes and sizes of people, and I have the smallest one- a “low-profile” port.)

It’s titanium and has a little bubble of self-healing silicone on the top that can be stuck up to a thousand times (though, hopefully, I won’t need nearly that many sticks).  Under the silicone is a little receptacle with a small tube coming out of it.  The tube goes directly into my superior vena cava so we don’t have to worry about tiny arm veins.  Although it makes me woozy, it’s pretty cool once you get all hooked up to it,because not only can the nurse put IV fluids into it, they can also put a blunt syringe on the tubing and if they pull on it, blood flows back out of it, so I only have to be stuck once on chemo day for the bloodwork and the chemo.

Anyway, back to my amazing body.  So, the superior vena cava is a nice, fat, juicy vein that returns deoxygenated blood from my upper body to my heart, (my vena cava is so awesome that it can even take that extra-bad chemo that dissolves tissue- the ones that the nurses wear protective gloves for- and just laugh at it).  Ergo, when I get chemo, all that crap is going directly into my heart, first the right atrium to right ventricle, then straight to my lungs for oxygen.  Then, via my pulmonary artery, it winds its way through the left atrium then the left ventricle then gets sent out via all sorts of different sizes of blood vessels to all my organs and cells and parts for which I do not know the name. 

This is why my chemo can cause heart muscle damage and decreased lung capacity.  But so far, it hasn’t.  Whoo.

After that chemo hits my heart it goes, unfiltered, straight to my kidneys, which are so mind-bogglingly amazing that 1/3 of all the blood my heart pumps out with every pump goes straight to them.  They are so awesome because they filter out some of the chemo, help my damaged body with making red blood cells, and regulate my blood pressure through managing my electrolyte levels, which can get weird with all of these IV fluids.

And while this is going on, at the rate of about 96 beats per minute (I’m hyperactive), my lymphatic system is working hard, too.  It won’t get all the chemo right away, but it is getting other wastes out of my blood to make way for chemo.  See, my blood releases waste into a special type of liquidy stuff called interstitial fluid, which gets picked up by tiny lymph capillaries and heads to my lymph nodes, of which I have about 599 (since I had that one surgically removed). 

The lymph nodes clean up the fluid, which is now called lymph, (pretty original, huh?), and return the interstitial fluid to the blood.  And this amazing thing happens all the time without me having to lift a finger!  (For those of you paying attention, you’ll remember that I have/had lymphoma, which is a cancer of the lymphatic tissues.)

My spleen is also filtering away at my blood, getting rid of unwanted stuff like damaged red blood cells, which might be more than usual considering that chemo attacks my bone marrow where all my happy little new red blood cells are born. 

And my liver!  Oh, my poor liver.  It is working very, very hard and probably cursing at me in French, (for some reason whenever I imagine my liver yelling at me it affects a throaty, French accent, don’t know why).  It’s filtering my blood left and right to figure out what the heck is in it and then how to detoxify it.  It does this by using complex calculations to figure out what enzymes it needs to break down the chemo and then how much and over how long a period of time.

Clearly, my liver is better at higher math than I.  And may or may not speak French.

Even my skin works hard, at trying to regulate my body temperature (chemo makes me fluctuate between freezing and sweating).  But, all that sweating is for a reason- it gets rid of urea and lactic acid.  Urea buildup is a very bad, painful thing, (commonly known as gout), and I even had to take a pill for 30 days prior to ever starting chemo to help prevent it because that first chemo is such a doozy. 

Is it any wonder that my skin gets really dry about 4 days post-chemo?  I hadn’t thought much about it before, but I bet it has something to do with all those waste deposits drying me out.  Yay for ginger shea body butter and dry brushing (which also stimulates lymphatic circulation and breaks up cellulite!).

You might be wondering about my brain, since I complain about chemo-brain so often.  I do feel a bit stupid and slow for about 3-4 days post chemo.  Thank goodness my brain is protected from most of the chemo by the blood-brain barrier, but there are certain free radicals that appear after my body works so hard to detox itself that do make their way to my brain, but I take a blue-green algae supplement in the hopes that I don’t have permanent brain damage.

And in between all of that, my body still breathes and digests food and thinks and creates and moves and sleeps and heals itself.

So, maybe I have spider veins on my right calf and the side of my left thigh and my belly’s a bit too round and my thighs are too heavy and my butt’s not perky enough and my arms don’t look like Madonna’s and my lower back curves in too much.  It’s ok.  My body is too spectacular for words, really, because I haven’t even remotely done it justice here. 

I don’t give my body enough credit; after all of this, it still knows how to live.