Magic comes with a price

Katie Thamer Treherne - illustration from
A Little Mermaid

Yesterday was not my best day ever.

I had my Faslodex, Xgeva, Lupron last week.  I'd even been upgraded to a 3-month dose of Lupron (1 injection, more medicine, lasts 3 months before needing the next injection), so for my next 2 visits I'm down to only 3 injections (Faslodex is 2 shots per dose).  So that's cool.

But in addition to the usual bruses, aches, and soreness from the various medications, and the physical side effects that are part of their life saving action, I've been noticing for a while that in the days after I get them, there are other side effects as well.

For one thing, they mess with my sleep.  Fortunately my oncologist has other things to help with that.  But, I've also been noticing more recently that they seem to also make it harder for me to be resilient emotionally.  I find myself less able to process stressful words, actions, events, right after I get the shots.  And I don't think that's something my oncologist can help me with.  So yesterday I was feeling that.  And even understanding that there was a chemical contributor, it was still a hard day.

Have you ever noticed that in some children's books magic is treated as a free gift with no-strings-attached, while in many, many others magic always comes with a price?

Mary Poppins is the free gift kind of magic, as she comes flying in out of nowhere to add interest and adventure to the lives of the Banks children.  Even when she flys out again, there's sadness, of course, but no one is the worse for wear, and there's even the promise (in French, in the book version anyway) to return again.

But in many other books and stories, when there's magic there's a bargain to be made, be it some sort of trade, tithe or blowback right from the start, or some sort of later discovered change or enslavement that turns out to come with all that power, or the dawning realization that the power or the situations you created with your magic because you thought they would be so lovely aren't all that lovely after all.

Medicine is kind of like that, too.  Some have side effects so minor that all you really get is win, but others have short or long lists of side effects and, like magic in books, the balance comes in determining if the reason to use the magic/the condition you need to treat with the medicine is worse than the side effects themselves.

I don't really find myself regretting the side effects of my medicines.  Especially after those nice stable scans that I also found out about last week, I'm feeling pretty warm and rosy about those little injectable buggers.  But they do have their price.

It's not as bad as the price of chemo, of course, and one of the biggest reliefs of the good scans is that it means I'm not back on chemo today.  Someday I probably will be (I'm learning to accept that), but I'm plenty happy that that day is not today.  Also, the permanent side effects from my previous chemos are really, really minor and managable, so that's also good.

As I heal up from the side effects of the latest radiation and am able to comfortably go for those 10,000 steps, I don't regreat having done that, either.  It occurs to me often as I go for those walks or tend my growing garden, or even use stairs easily on a regular basis, that those were the reasons I chose to get the hip radiated and here I am doing those thing, just like I wanted! 

But yesterday I wasn't feeling so jubilant.  And lack of jubelation was snowballing.  Among other stressful things to my resilliance-free self, I had not gotten in my 10,000 steps the day before (lots of driving and people over, so not bad reasons, just reasons) and had intended to make up for the missing steps by doing more yesterday.  But the worse I felt about it, the less I was able to just get up and do it, and the more time passed when I hadn't been able to get up and do it, the worse I felt.

Finally, my husband came home from work and I was at a paultry 3000 steps.  Not, necessairly the biggest deal in life, of course, but the walking is a "medicine" whose only real unpleasant side effect is time.  And it's something my oncologist recommended.  And it could help.  And it's something I can do, I can control in as world where the cancer seems to say "I'll do whatever I damn well please and there's nothing you can do to stop me." Which we deal with using "There are some major side effects but we hope it will slow down the cancer whose major side effect is death" medicine.  So getting in the steps feels really important.

And there I was at 3000 steps, failing at something important.  And that, tacked right on to my increasingly long list of other things that weren't being dealt with, seriously stressed my lack of resilience.

The crazy good part of all this is that when my husband came home from work, he suggested we take care of that walk right then and there, just go out and do it.  So, we drove to the local track (yes, we did drive out so we could walk) and together we walked around and around and around that track until we reached the 10,000 step point.

Instead of being a death march, walking with my guy on a summer evening, with other people coming and going and doing their own thing, watching the sky turn golden pink, seeing the birds and bees flit around in the overgrown border of weeds and wildflowers, it felt precious.

And, somehow, wasting the day and pulling it through at the end, against all odds, also felt important.  More important, even, than being virtuous all day and not needing to grab the fat out of the fire would have felt.  I guess it's because life is that way a lot of the time, crappy things happen, or are said, or come up as a consequence of something else, and sometimes resilience is in very short supply.  Yesterday I was coming up short on so many things, but we were still able to make good on a bad day.  It was like, for that day, with his help, the greedy gods of cancer and the dark price of magic were unexpectedly, at the very last minute, actually appeased.

With the work accomplished, we went home.  My husband baked chocolate chip cookies and my Fitbit dashboard called me a "Champ".

And I felt a whole lot better.