My Happiness Project

Me: I don’t think my pre-New Year’s resolution is working.

Hubby: What? To be more pleasant?

Me: Yeah.

Hubby: No. It’s not working.

Happiness has been on my mind a lot lately. Apparently, it has not been on my face.

Christmas, my most favourite time of the year, is now over, leaving scraps of wrapping, fallen ornaments, and bits of Lego all over my house. I’ll clean it up eventually. But for now, it’s resolution time, and that means looking back over the ruins of 2012.

Only, I don’t particularly want to look back. The only things back there for me are heartbreak, nausea, vomiting, and more heartbreak. Of course, there were lots of lovely people doing lovely things, but mostly, when I look back at 2012, I feel like throwing up. I remember feeling like I was dying (because I was). I remember wondering how my children would go on without me. I remember hospital food, and IV drips, and lots of pain. I don’t want to remember any of that. So, there will be no reflecting on 2012. There will only be moving forward.

Which brings me to resolutions. Seeing as 2012 was by far the worst year of my life, I am hoping to make 2013 the best. And that means finally doing what I love (rather than what’s “legitimate” or “respectable”). It means being gentler, more patient, and ideally, funnier (because who doesn’t want to be funnier?). Most importantly, it means being happier.

Among the many books that I have devoured recently, I just read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. While Rubin did not wait for a life crisis to inspire her to be happier, it seems that I did. I look back over the last few years and see a stressed out young mother doing a PhD who drank way too much coffee and had way too little fun. I see a woman who hardly smiled, rarely laughed, and was far too impatient with her young son. I’m sure that’s not what everyone saw – I kept my friends, so I can’t have been too miserable, but I do know that I wasn’t terribly happy. And then I self-destructed.

Disappointingly, I’m still not that happy. I mean, I’m happy to be alive and my marriage is good and I’m grateful for all the things that I have, so in the long-view I’m certainly happy, but on a day-to-day basis I don’t score too well. I don’t skip and sing around the house. I waste too much time on Facebook. I’m very easily irritated. I readily admit that I can be snappish. I love my children but they also drive me absolutely out of my mind. I don’t do most of the activities that I find really fun. I’ve also been noticing lately that I get accused of being grumpy even when I’m not, which makes me think that I’m not exuding the cheerful personality that I would like to have. My doctor pointed out that at least some of this irritability can be attributed to some (permanent) side effects of radiation, which made me even crankier because it means I have very little control over the situation. Was I destined to be grumpy forever?

I decided that this just wasn’t acceptable. I want to be happier and I want to be happier now. So 2013 is the year to do it. Up until now, I’ve just been trying to survive. Happiness or self-fulfillment had no place in my day-to-day try-not-to-die regimen.

But I just read a different book (Wild by Cheryl Strayed) in which the author’s mother dies when the author is 22, which scatters her remaining family and puts her into a downward spiral of mourning, drugs and promiscuity for years. I pictured my darling daughter trying to cope without me, having her wedding and babies without me there, and I decided that I must do every possible thing within my power to stay alive for her and my son. I will go vegan and organic, I will drink green smoothies for breakfast, swallow boatloads of supplements and suck back horrible tasting Vitamin C gels. I will eliminate stressful endeavors (very hard for a type-A personality). I will meditate. I will run (but not too much). And I will do my best to be happy. Because happier people are healthier, and they definitely make better parents.

Following Rubin’s lead, I’ve decided to break the upcoming year into twelve resolution themes, one per month, such as energy, marriage, and parenting. Within those themes will be specific tasks and goals that I will try to accomplish to make me more energetic, more loving, and, well, happier. The idea is that by having these ongoing resolutions throughout the year, I will be more focused on choosing happiness whenever possible. The plan will remind me to choose fun activities as often as I can, to say no to things that are draining, to keep my house tidy (clutter makes me very grumpy), to clean out my closets, and to generally smile more.

We always say: “Life is too short...” Well, life really is too short to be grumpy or unhappy or bored. So for the next few months I will be blogging about finding happiness after cancer. Maybe some of you will feel inclined to join me.

Don't Push It

I begin this blog entry with a sigh. I understand everyone’s concern. Yes, I almost died, therefore I should take it easy. Rest is important. I get it. But to be honest, if I hear “don’t push it” one more time, I might just freak out.

See, when I say that I am running five kilometres only five months post-transplant, most non-runners are amazed and, often, aghast. Five whole kilometres?! How can this be? To many non-runners, this is an unfathomable distance to run. Many people train for months to accomplish a 5k running race. So for them, it’s a big deal and a hugely strenuous effort. It makes sense, then, for them to think that I am pushing it.

My running friends, however, who have logged hundreds of kilometres with me, will understand why five kilometres is really just baby steps. Five kilometres is me not pushing it. I used to pound back half-marathons every single weekend without a second thought. I would click off five-minute kilometres as my easy, resting pace. Now, when it takes me over seven minutes to run one single kilometre, I am horrified. (Yes, running pals, it’s true. Seven minutes.) So for me, I am barely going faster than walking pace. I hardly feel like I’m running. I don’t even break a sweat. And then someone tells me “well…don’t push it.”

The same could be said for weight training. I recently joined a gym again, upon the realization that all the good intentions in the world would never materialize into me lifting weights at home. For four months I had been telling my husband that I would strength train at home, transforming my stick arms into bulging biceps and my spindly legs into trunks of steel. And for four months I never did. So I joined a gym with childcare and now I go twice and week and pump iron. I use the term loosely and with much glee. This skinny body “pumping iron” is hilarious. I couldn’t push it even if I wanted to. I do the machine circuits, lifting a fraction of what I once could do. I try to do push-ups and collapse onto my face. Baby steps.

On my first day at the gym, I was warming up on the elliptical beside a woman who struck fear into my heart. As I stood on my elliptical, not pushing it, she looked like she was attacking her machine. I was waiting for her to mutter, “Die, Elliptical, DIE!!” I didn’t dare giggle.

On my second day at the gym, I went to a “Bodypump” class, which is essentially a guided weight-lifting session with wild music and lots of excessive cheering. I had no idea what I was doing. When I got in, all the women were grabbing barbells and sliding weights onto them. I have never used a barbell in my life. So I did what any observant person would do – I copied and dutifully slid on some weights, then used the clampy thing to hold them on. I looked around me and tried to gauge how much weight I should put on the bar. That woman looked retirement age, so I could probably lift more than her (I couldn’t). That other woman looked really skinny, so she couldn’t be much stronger than me (she was). I grabbed all the other equipment that the other women were grabbing, plus a few extra things just in case and then music began.

Lord have mercy. I clearly put too much weight on my bar. The retired woman was kicking my rear end. I tried to find a good time to pause and take off some of the plates without looking like an idiot, but there was no pause. So I suffered through. Then the music stopped and the clanking of weight plates was everywhere. What was happening? I looked around in a panic – were they making their bars lighter or heavier? Lighter, thank goodness. But how much lighter? Since I had no idea what was coming, I had no idea what to do. So I guessed, again, and got it wrong, again.

Clearly I don’t know my own strength.

But then I told someone else this story, thinking it was pretty funny, and instead of encouraging me or being impressed that I even tried a weight-lifting class, that person said, you guessed it, “well…just don’t push it.”

But what I’ve realized is this: survivors push it. That’s how we survive. We push through chemo, we push the odds, we push our doctors, we push for treatment, we push against treatment. We don’t sit around waiting for death. We run from it. For five whole kilometres.

When I had pneumonia, I didn’t push anything. I sat on the couch or in the hospital and watched TV. I did nothing. And, within days, I became depressed and felt like a sick loser.

And that happened because running is not just exercise. It’s not just about getting your heart rate up and breathing hard. Running is transformative, it banishes depression, it makes you think that anything is possible, it makes you feel part of the living again. And that’s why I push it.

Let’s be honest. Runners, myself included, don’t always want to run. We don’t love it all the time. It’s cold outside. It’s snowing. I have an aversion to wind whipping in my face just like most of you. Most of the time I’d rather just have a hot bath and a nap. But where would that get me? Yes, I need rest, but I also need exercise, even more than the average person does: survivors who exercise (vigorously) have a much lower risk of relapse.

So I will push it, thank you very much. And I will keep running for my life.

Sick Loser

Some days it’s hard not to feel like a sick loser.

I like to think that I’ve been fairly plucky and optimistic throughout this cancer calamity, but then I got pneumonia and found myself back in a hospital bed, getting IV antibiotics.

And I felt like a sick loser.

Now, this is certainly no judgment on other sick people, though I’m sure they feel the same way at times. Nor is this a call for Facebook platitudes that say: “You are SUCH a winner!” Please refrain. I know that I am not actually a loser. But when you find yourself back in that hospital bed with the IV swoosh-swooshing and the hum of nurses giving chemo or blood transfusions to other unfortunate patients, you cannot help feeling, once again, ejected from normal life.

Like many other Type A overachiever personalities, I had big plans for myself before cancer. Plans to do Big Things and accomplish Important Stuff. But the problem is, I was only in the middle of doing Important Stuff when cancer struck. I hadn’t actually done anything notable yet. In my mind, anyway.

Sure, I’ve had two babies and so far they are turning out ok, so that’s certainly significant, but when your circle of acquaintances is chock full of highly educated, super overachievers too, then watching re-runs of Love It or List It for months on end is guaranteed to make you feel a little short of amazing.

What I mean is, I’m not a doctor fixing cleft palates, or a lawyer fighting for human rights, or a refugee camp worker giving rations to pregnant women. I’m not in the poor neighbourhoods of Ecuador interviewing girls on the street (which is what I would have been doing right now, if cancer hadn’t struck).

Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do something Great. With huge restrictions on my traveling, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to finish my research, or if I even want to. I don’t know what I want to do when my health becomes predictable enough to actually work again. It’s really hard to see past cancer when you’ve been sick for nearly a year. I don’t even remember what my normal self feels like.

And that is certainly part of the problem. I have never shied away from hard work. When my high school drama teacher asked me to do a scene for an assignment, I did an entire one-act play. When I had a choose a country for my master’s fieldwork, I picked Colombia. When I needed to decide on a long-term career, I picked a PhD. Hard work is what I do.

Until I became a sick loser.

Now by the end of the day I can barely muster up the energy to cook dinner or sweep my floors. Change the world? I don't even change the toilet paper rolls. Everything I can think of doing is just too hard.

Finish my PhD? Way too much work.

Become a yoga teacher? Too much time.

Publish a novel? Too daunting.

Start my own business? Too complicated.

Become a professional trail runner? Too much training.

Become a professional clown? Too much makeup.

Become an actor? Too many auditions, too much work, too much everything.

Now I am not a lazy person, but cancer seems to have sucked all the drive out of me. Anything with the potential to make an impact in this world takes a lot of effort, effort that I do not have. And yes, of course I am recovering and of course I need to give myself time. But I have no idea how much time I have left.

So am I destined to be a sick loser forever? I sure hope not. But for now, being anything else seems like too much work.

Parenting Through

As I sit here reflecting (in the thirty minutes that I’ve luxuriously set aside for writing today), I have been trying to imagine what my recovery would be like if I wasn’t a mom. Do not misunderstand me – my children have been an enormous reason for my quick recovery and my ongoing will to survive – but I have a sense that the average cancer patient with young children goes "back to work” a lot sooner than the ones without children.

I will give you an example of what I mean. For the first two months after my bone marrow transplant, I slept until at least eight o’clock every morning. I had a nap every day, then I walked, wrote, read books, watched movies… sometimes I even managed some yoga or strength work. For the most part, I was a total sloth, and I needed to be. When the chemo and radiation are strong to almost kill you, well, they really do almost kill you. I spent as much time as I could with the kids, but after a while their noise and enthusiasm exhausted me and back to bed I went. I could afford to rest this much only because we had a full-time nanny and my parents were in town helping out (bless their exhausted hearts).

Those of you who are cancer survivors may be familiar with this phrase: “For the next year, recovery is your full-time job.”

Well… I hate to break it my doc, but starting two and half months post-transplant, when my nanny went back to school and my mom flew home, parenting became my full-time job. The doctors are very firm about not “working,” but they say nothing about parenting. And in my opinion, chasing after two energetic munchkins for ten hours every day is a lot more demanding than sitting at a desk for eight hours (and I’m not just ranting, I’ve done both. This is a very scientific comparison.)

So, even with part-time nanny help that breaks the bank, I am now up at six thirty every day. I make breakfast, pack lunches, sweep floors, put away toys, read books, end squabbles, drive to preschool, take the kids on nature walks, go to museums, go to the library, do laundry, make dinner and much, much more. I even made detailed spider and mummy cookies for my son's preschool Halloween party, and upon arrival realized that I had made the most elaborate cookies of the bunch. Now, I realize this is par for the course for any stay-at-home mom, but it isn’t for a recovering bone marrow recipient. There is not much room for “recovery” in this routine.

And let's add this little vignette: my son goes to a cooperative preschool, which means that each parent has a “duty day” every month. On this day, the parent is at the preschool for the whole three hours helping out. The duty parent must also bring the snack, serve it and clean it up, and then clean up the whole preschool (vacuum, sweep, bathrooms, etc.) at the end of the day. So there I was last week, exhausted from another night of insomnia, playing with a room full of four-year-olds, and then strapping my daughter to my back so that I could do all the cleaning afterward. I don’t even clean my own house right now, but there I was sweeping up sparkly sand with a twenty-five pound toddler on my back. One of the other moms, a kind soul who vaguely knows what I’ve been through, stayed with me and helped sweep. I must have looked as exhausted as I felt, despite trying to keep a brave and happy face.

I say this all not to complain – Lord knows there are people that have it tougher than I do. I do not, for example, have to cross the raging Mekong river on a precarious tightrope to catch dinner for my family (we’ve been watching a lot of BBC’s Human Planet around here). I simply share my stories to illustrate how different “recovery” looks when you have young children. I am sure there are thousands of women out there who have done the same. We are all “back at work” much earlier than the doctors prescribe, but it is rarely recognized as such.

Perhaps what I am not seeing is the recovery borne out of necessity. Perhaps if I were still allowed to sit around and watch movies all day, I would feel sort of listless and maybe even a little depressed at my lack of usefulness. Instead, there is little time for whining or even much self-reflection in my day. I am needed. I am wanted. I am busy. I often forget that I am in recovery and then become frustrated when I am so tired by the afternoon. In the brief respites I do have, I’m either napping or looking up recipes that might appeal to my ever-pickier four-year-old. By the time the kids are in bed, I flop on the couch like a fish that gave up fighting the net. Thank God I have an amazing husband who does all the clean up in the evenings. Otherwise we would all be neck-deep in dirty dishes, crumbs and leftovers, and, most likely, mice. No thanks.

Of course, while there are many days when I am proud of my ability to “parent through,” I do worry that the lack of adequate rest will affect my recovery. Like any cancer survivor, I am plagued daily with a fear that those nasty rogue cells will come back. I then fantasize a recovery without children, where I could get the rest I need – sleeping in, leisurely runs every day, hours to write, daily yoga, endless movies and novels…. It seems like heaven. Until I realize that in this scenario my children would never be there. You just can’t have it both ways.

The fact is, my kids give me the most powerful reason to live. And even though my son literally never stops talking, and my tiny daughter thinks it’s hilarious to smack me in the face, and even though the two of them can make a mess faster than you can say Tasmanian devil, I still would not trade places with a childless survivor for a second.

Well, maybe for second. Ok, maybe just for one day. But then I want them back.

One Hundred Days

Well, today is the day. Day One Hundred. As predicted, nothing incredibly epic happened today, aside from the fact that I took both my kids to Ikea, by myself, and we all emerged happy and unscathed. (Trust me, this was a big deal.)

I have learned a lot over the last few months, so I thought I would share a few things that I now know, after one hundred days.

1. Eyebrows and eyelashes are critical to looking human.

Laugh if you must, but without hair and eyelashes, and especially without eyebrows, we would all look like aliens (or like the Observers from Fringe). I can attest to this firsthand, after watching my eyebrows and lashes slowly disappear from the lethal pre-transplant chemo and radiation. My eyelashes didn’t completely fall out – I probably had about five lonely lashes on each eye. But try putting mascara on that – it looked like a spider got trapped and was waving sadly from underneath my eyelid. Now that my eyelashes are back, I spend a luxurious thirty seconds every morning curling them, just because I can.

2. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger.

Despite what many pop artists may claim, sometimes what doesn’t kill you just makes you really, really weak. Sure, I may be stronger in spirit (after being crushed), but my body is the weakest it has ever been in my adult life. Some parts of me are permanently damaged from chemo and radiation. I will be dealing with the fallout for the rest of my life. I choose to be stronger, but it wasn’t the radiation that made me that way. In fact, I found out later that the dose of total body radiation I received is one hundred percent fatal within a few weeks without “radical” intervention such as a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. (I’m glad I didn’t know that before I went under the beam.) That almost killed me - and I'm pretty sure it did not make me stronger.

3. To your kids, sometimes even 24/7 is not enough.

Now that I’ve regained a lot of my strength and am about seventy-five to eighty percent of my normal self, my kids cannot get enough of me. They have turned into barnacle babies. My daughter literally hangs onto my leg as I drag her around the kitchen trying to make breakfast. My son comes into our room in the middle of night wanting to snuggle. When I read stories, he burrows into me so hard that I think he is actually trying to crawl under my skin. I go to the bathroom and within seconds they are both banging on the door. All of this makes it very hard to balance my need for personal healing time and my children’s need for their mama. The kids win out almost every time.

4. There are many different kinds of tired.

I have now experienced too many of them. There is the “I stayed up all night to write a term paper” tired. Easy peasy. Then there is the “my son got up five times three nights in a row” tired. Not so easy. Then there is the “my daughter has been waking up every hour for the last two months” tired. Total hell. This is where you get into brain-cell killing fatigue. And then there is the “my doctors killed me and brought me back to life” tired. In my vast experience with sleep deprivation, nothing quite tops this last one. After three months, I am only barely shaking the all-consuming fatigue, and they tell me it will take a full year to recover. So… don’t call me after nine. I’ll be asleep.

5. I am not invincible

This may seem obvious, but until you almost die, I think most of us have an underlying, somewhat naïve feeling of invincibility. And by that I mean that many of us, including my pre-cancer self, believe that we are going to live until we’re eighty or ninety. We believe we’re going to watch our kids grow up and that we’ll dance at their weddings. We believe that we’ll be there to see our grandkids, and maybe even great grandkids. We believe that we’ll celebrate fiftieth anniversaries with our spouses. And then cancer comes calling and those beliefs come crashing down. Suddenly we are faced with death, faced with the unthinkable idea that we might not live until we’re eighty, that we might not even live until next year. I will never again be able to blissfully believe that I have all the time in the world. It is a type of innocence lost forever, and I wish I could have it back.

I have learned many other things, like how wonderful my friends and family are, what a strong person my husband is, and what incredible parents I have. I have learned how incredibly generous people can be. I have learned that I can be funny even when I don’t feel funny, and I’ve also learned that sometimes I am simply not funny at all. That’s ok. Cancer is rarely funny, we just make it seem that way so that we can survive it. And so far, I’m surviving. One hundred days and counting.

Reconstruction

I have less than three weeks before I hit the critical one hundred days post-transplant. I know that nothing epic will happen on that particular day (except perhaps a good celebratory dinner), but it is still a hugely important milestone.

For one thing, it means that I will be out of the most acute recovery zone. I will not be “out of the woods” so to speak (that takes years), but I will be able to get off most of my medications and live a bit more normally.

And by “more normally,” I mean that maybe I can eat a breakfast that is bigger than the mountain of pills I take each morning. Maybe I can pull my wallet from my purse without a vial of heparin popping out onto the counter. (Yes, that really happened.) Or perhaps I won’t have to explain to perfect strangers who just had to know where I get my hair cut that it’s actually a wig.

But reconstruction is one tough gig. First there are medications, supplements, green smoothies, huge salads, and litres upon litres of water. Then, to gain weight, there are avocados, hemp seed, peanut butter and protein shakes. Then, to gain muscle, there are lunges, squats, sit-ups, bicep curls, hikes, walks, and the infamous shuffle. And, to gain everything else, there is prayer. There is always, always prayer.

I will readily admit that on some days I just sit around and do nothing. I skip strength training sessions just like I did before I was sick (it has never been my favourite thing). But I cannot be this hobbling, weak waif forever, and not only because I am way too old to start a modelling career. So I walk, I eat, and I lift my paltry two-and-a-half pound dumbbells. (Yes, you read that right. I have been reduced to weights that my grandmother could probably juggle.)

This is all very humbling for a woman who once ran over seventy kilometres a week, did power yoga, and hit the gym on a regular basis. It is very tempting to wallow in self-pity and stay on the couch watching The O.C. re-runs (don’t judge). But I walk my forty-five minutes almost every day. Some days I get pretty far in those minutes, other days I don’t. Some days I even run-walk. It can be a monotonous grind, but on those days, I just remind myself of the time in the hospital where I couldn’t even stand up. I remember that and think of the people still on the ward, and I keep going. I have a chance now to rebuild myself the way I want – from skin and bones to muscular and fit – and who gets a chance like that?

So I pray and meditate and try to figure out where my life went wrong. Regrets come in hard and fast. What if I had done that, or this? What if I had not done that? I try to remind myself that this cancer is not my fault. Sometimes that’s a hard thing to remember.

I rebuild in teeny tiny pieces. There are days when I hate it, when I am sick of being so tired and weak. There are days when I wish I could erase it all and be in Ecuador where I was supposed to be this fall. But most of the time I try to live where I am. I cannot change what happened, but I can reconstruct myself. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Bows and Marrows

My son asked me the other night if my “blood cell factory” was working again, and that reminded me of this blog post – one I meant to write long ago but didn’t. I just couldn’t.

Talking to children about illness, after all, is not something in which I am an expert. In fact, when the social worker gave me a book titled “When a Parent is Sick,” I instantly recoiled. We were not that family. And yet, devastatingly, we were.

The book was a knife to my stomach. It had ways to explain death and dying to children of every age. I nearly tossed it across the room. I was not going to tell my four-year-old that his mommy might die. That was simply not happening. But I didn’t want to lie to him either. He was old enough that he should know what’s going on. Besides, he is very clever and a master eavesdropper. Eventually he was going to pick up on what the grown-ups were saying.

So I sat him down to have “the cancer talk,” admittedly very angry at God that I had to have this talk at all. But we all have our roads to travel, and this was mine. I had found a video online from a children’s hospital that explained leukemia with all types of candies, and then I found another video that explained bone marrow (calling it a “blood cell factory”). My son looked from me to the videos, wide-eyed and nearly silent the entire time. Clearly he knew this was serious business, because for my son, being silent at any time is practically miraculous.

Finally I asked him if he had any questions.

“Do I have leukemia?” He asked. The mere thought of it tore my heart in half.

“No, baby, you don’t have leukemia. It’s very, very rare. You are not going to get leukemia.”

“Does Daddy have leukemia?”

“No, baby, Daddy doesn’t have it and he’s not going to get it.”

“Well then why did you get it?”

This was the part I was dreading. I could not explain to my son why I got leukemia because no one knew. I couldn’t explain to him how he could avoid it, or how I could avoid getting it again, because no one knew. It was infuriating. All I could tell him was that it was very rare. But how does a four-year-old understand “rare”? His mommy and daddy are his whole world. If Mommy can get it, then half the world can get it too.

But he seemed to accept my attempt at answers for the time being. We watched the videos again (upon request), and then he only had one more question:

“Mommy, when do you get your new bow and arrow?”

Well… I did my best. Clearly I couldn’t expect him to grasp it all. And I should have known that he would somehow turn it all into a weapons issue.

Come to think of it, I never did get any new weaponry along with my transplant. Perhaps now it’s time.

Random Hospital Hilarity

This blog would not be complete if I didn’t include at least one entry of random moments in the hospital that were simply too funny to keep to myself. I love people-watching to begin with, but people-watching at the hospital is pure gold. Sure, there are weird people everywhere, but people at the hospital are an entirely different level of weird. (You nurses especially know what I’m talking about.)

One glorious example happened when I was waiting to be picked up at the main entrance. First, there are No Smoking signs plastered all over the entrance, and the smoking area is across the parking lot. Second, people often violate this rule. Third, on this particular day, I was very cranky, and I have little tolerance for smoking at the best of times.

So… I was waiting for my ride and I smelled smoke. This made me irrationally upset and I immediately looked around for the culprit. I saw a woman smoking about three metres away from me, right underneath a No Smoking sign.

I went up to her, extremely annoyed at her disregard for the sign.

“Excuse me, lady,” I said, a tad too sharply. (Yes, I actually called her “lady.” Like I said, I was cranky.) “You cannot smoke here. There are tons of sick people waiting for rides and we are all inhaling your smoke. Besides that, you are standing right in front of a No Smoking sign.”

She half turned, but didn’t make eye contact, and said, “I’m blind. I can’t see the sign.”

Yes, this really happened. I had practically said, “Can’t you see the sign?” to a blind woman. I wanted to dissolve into the sidewalk. At least ten people had seen this go down, and I went from vigilante no-smoking enforcer to the woman taking a strip off a blind lady. It was mortifying. After I took a few seconds to recover, I helped her over to a different area where she could smoke (because God forbid she would actually put out her cigarette).

Not even five minutes later, a different woman came out of the entrance and asked me if I had a cigarette. I burst out laughing. I was at a hospital wearing a scarf on my head in forty-degree heat. I was clearly a cancer patient.

“Did you just ask me if I had a cigarette?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Yeah,” she snapped. (I guess I wasn’t the only cranky person that day.)

I laughed and gestured to my scarf. “Do I look like someone who should be smoking?”

She just stared at me blankly, still waiting for an answer. Clearly her observational skills needed some more development. So I directed her to go join the blind lady in the designated smoking area.

Not to be outdone by those two fabulous women was the young man in his twenties with whom I had the misfortune of riding the elevator. He was wearing a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, fully unzipped, with no shirt underneath. He had a sideways ball cap and matching sweatpants on, and a tube was popping out from the waistband of his sweatpants, running down his leg and straight into a bag of urine that was dangling from his ankle. In fact, his pant leg was hiked up so the bag was fully visible and hanging free. Yet he walked out of that elevator like he owned the place, pee bag or not.

He was going the same place I was, so I ended up following him outside where a group of friends was waiting for him. I have to wonder – if you are meeting some friends that are kind enough to visit you at the hospital, would you not go to a little trouble to hide your bag of pee? Quite the contrary, it seems. This young man immediately pointed out his urine to his friends (as if they could have missed it), and went on a very spicy rant about how the nurses kept telling him that he “didn’t know how to [insert gratuitous swearing] pee.”

This man was not letting the hospital wreck his swagger, I’ll give him that.

So there you have it. Nothing profound today, just random moments of hilarity from the hospital. If you are ever bored, or if you are a writer or actor searching for a new character, I would highly recommend the main entrance of any hospital. I am quite sure you will not be disappointed.

I Had Leukemia

Carefully note the past tense. See you later cancer, you are not welcome back. Of course, we will never know if I’m completely cured, so that unknown will always hang over me. I also have a very long road to recovery, with many more potential complications and speed bumps. But for now, I cheated death. My donor saved me. The new bone marrow is working. And hopefully, with time, that new marrow will become my own, cancer’s threat will fade, and this nightmare that I’ve lived for the past six months will slip further into my memory.

My four-year-old son told me yesterday that he was proud of me. For what, I wondered. He didn’t really have an answer. He was just proud of me.

Maybe he instinctively knows that I have been through hell. Maybe he knows that I went to the brink of death and then clawed my way back, thinking of him and his sister and his dad the entire time. Maybe, on some level, he knows that I said “No thank you” to death’s invitation (only I wasn’t that polite, and there were definitely some curses involved). Maybe, somehow, he knows that I’m still struggling, that it still hurts, and that I still need lots of hugs and kisses. Four-year-olds can be very wise.

I am now in the fragile, treacherous ground of post-transplant recovery. Every change in health, every rash, fever, cough, or sniffle must be documented and investigated. I am so tired that, like a newborn, I usually need a nap about two hours after I wake up. When I am awake, I am not always coherent. I walk like a little old lady (really, I do). But every day seems just a little bit better than the last, and so I cling to hope.

I had leukemia once. It's a horrible story that I'm not going to tell very often. But next year on June 27^th I’m having a (re)birthday party. Mark it down. Save the date. 

It’s going to be a big one.

So...Are You On Any Medication?

Last week I had my official pre-transplant consultation, and one of the big concerns that came up was my weight. I’ve lost about 10 pounds off my “normal” weight, but I was fairly thin to begin with. Now I am right on the cusp of being officially underweight. On Thursday last week, the doctor told me that I could expect to lose at least another 10 pounds during the transplant process. Then she gave me a five-second once-over and sighed.

“Ok.” She said. “Your job before you start chemo is to gain as much weight as you can, so that you have some reserve.” (Apparently you can be too skinny.)

I looked at her. “So… you want me to gain a whole bunch of weight in the next four days?”

Pause. “Yes, as much as you can.”

Well, all right then! Bring on the nachos! Avocado! Peanut butter!

I did my best, but five days later and I only managed to put on two measly pounds. When you don’t eat meat, gluten or dairy, and you’re supposed to stay away from sugar, saturated fats, processed foods, and refined carbs, weight is not that easy to gain. (I know, “boo-hoo” say all of you trying to lose weight. But I would take a little excess fat over leukemia every day of the week.)

However, yesterday I got home from my first day of pre-transplant chemo, and along with a truckload of other medications, I am back on steroids that always make me ravenously hungry. So perhaps I can gain a few more pounds before losing it all.

The first day of pre-BMT chemo was fairly anticlimactic considering the huge red letters it has had on our calendar for the last few weeks. Half an hour of IV chemotherapy, some consults with the doctor and pharmacists, and that was it. But what I wasn’t expecting was the enormous bag of drugs they sent me home with. Decadron. Zofran. Ursodiol. Dilantin. And that’s less than half of them. For a woman who has rarely taken prescription medication, I must admit this is hugely overwhelming.

It went a little like this:

“Take this one in the morning with food, but this one in the morning on an empty stomach. Take this one in the afternoon with a snack, but away from other medications. This one will make you drowsy. This one might give you jitters. Take this one at dinner, but away from any calcium or antacids. Take this one at night with food. Take this one at night away from food.”

I wish I were joking. My medications schedule is like a bewildering and somewhat cruel matrix that you need superpowers to decipher. (Good thing I'm getting radiation soon. Maybe that will help with the mutant-superpower thing.) Add the drowsiness-jitters-anxiety-nausea from all the medications, and it will be a miracle if I get it all right. And then the pharmacist laughed and told me that “more are coming.” People around here have a very strange sense of humour.

I too am joining the ranks of inappropriate hilarity. What I found particularly funny is when I saw a new counselor last week and she asked me if I was on any supplements or medications. I laughed.

“Um… do you want them alphabetically or by colour?”

I feel like I am on every medication. And next week they will add more.

But somehow I will make it through. Because I have to. Yesterday might have been Day One of killing Rachel, but next week will be Day One of my rebirth. Until then, I will be busy pill-popping. I know, I know. I said I don’t do that kind of thing. But there is a distinct difference between pills to protect your kidneys and pills to knock out your senses. If the kidney medication does both, well… win win.

So if my writing gets worse or more nonsensical over the next few weeks, or if (God forbid) I start to have spelling and grammatical errors, then please, let’s chalk it up to the medication, shall we?

Shuffling Along

Before cancer, I considered myself an athlete. I was not elite-level by any means, but I ran with an amazing team of very fast women and a great coach. I ran my first marathon right before my son turned one (not fast, mind you, but I still ran it). I broke 20 minutes in a 5k race the summer he turned two, and that same year I won a trail race for the first time. I never ran track in high school or university, so when I joined the racing team, interval and track workouts were entirely new to me. I loved it. I loved the lung-heaving, muscle-burning feel of a tough workout. I loved chatting with the girls on really long runs. I especially loved tackling tough uphills and technical downhills in the trails.

But getting cancer put a major kink in my running plans. Suddenly I was in the land of the sick and sedentary, and I was in major endorphin withdrawal.

Among many other things, this summer was supposed to be my comeback year after pregnancy (in my own head, that is. I’m quite sure no one else was counting the days until my “comeback”). In any case, this was my year to get back into awesome shape, run some really fast 5ks, and tackle some fun trail races before heading to South America. Now, I’m happy when I can complete a 40-minute walk, and I never stray far from home. But I’ve been feeling pretty good lately, and I’ve been itching to run. I am acutely aware that I have a few precious weeks of feeling good before they hit me with industrial strength chemo. I know, however, that low platelets and pounding the pavement do not make good bedfellows. So I walk.

After two rounds of chemo, I’m now waiting for my bone marrow transplant, which is scheduled to happen in a few weeks. At my last doctor’s appointment, after an hour discussing clinical trials and radiation and other Very Serious Things, he asked me if I had any more questions. So I said: “Yes. Can I run between now and the transplant?”

You could have heard a pin drop in the room. There was an absolute stillness as the two nurses and the doctor stared at me like I was a total nut. After a very long pause, the doctor said: “Well… no one’s ever asked me that before.”

The final consensus was that yes, I was allowed to run, though I could tell they thought I was crazy. Maybe I am. But I am not about to lie around like a lump, crying and waiting to die.

So during my first “run” last week, which was more of a power walk with a few breathless shuffles in between, I imagined what racing with cancer would look like. I could get electrolytes pumped straight into my chest catheter (no water stations required!). I would schedule races right after blood transfusions so I had extra energy (legal blood doping!). I would run fundraising races for cancer and collect the proceeds at the end (thank you very much!). It would be awesome.

And then I stopped after only a few minutes, chest heaving, muscles burning, humbled and overwhelmed at my lack of fitness. Maybe racing will have to wait until after cancer. I do have some sense, after all.

But I won’t quit. So if you see me, skinny, bald and panting, shuffling along the local paths, please don’t call an ambulance. I don't need medical attention. I'm just “running.”

You Have to be In It...

As optimistic and determined as I have been through this cancer journey, I will readily admit that I have my off days. Most of the time since I was discharged, I’ve just been living my life as best I can amidst frequent hospital visits. I rest, walk, read and enjoy my family. But every once in a while, I have a Really Bad Day. Usually those are the days where my mind goes into cataclysmic mode, where an infected blister means I’ll lose my foot, a runny nose means a deadly virus (obviously), or I imagine myself as a widow if my husband is a half hour late. Without doubt, this kind of thinking is not helpful to recovery.

Then, in the midst of this funk, I get bombarded with overwhelming information and impossible decisions. Radiation or not? Clinical trial or standard treatment? Door Number One has a laundry list of scary side effects. Door Number Two has different ones. Door Number Three is locked.

So how do you get out of such a black cloud? Caffeine, alcohol, saturated fat and sugar are all out for me. Exercise is a possibility, but I can't work out hard enough to really make a difference. Sedatives are an option, as are some pretty strong painkillers, but pill popping is not really my thing (plus it is so passé).

There is, of course, the “It Could Be Worse” game. And believe me, it could always be worse. My children aren’t starving. I don’t live in a war zone. I still have my legs. I haven’t been abducted by guerrillas. Or gorillas. The list goes on. But this game does not usually make me feel better. In fact, it just makes me sad to think about all of the awful things that people experience (and it makes me a little wary of gorillas). 

Finally I realized that sometimes you just have to feel it. Some days, there is no escape. You just have to sit in the funk. Now I'm not one to advocate wallowing, because that generally just makes you and everyone around you miserable. But all of this illness and trauma and decision making is part of the human experience -- we cannot just skip the hard parts or check out until something good comes along. Bad things happen to everyone. The degree of "badness" might differ, but no one is exempt. When I accepted that my sudden illness was all part of being human, "Why Me?” became “Why Not Me?” Life is painful and unfair, yes, but it is also wonderful, magical, and miraculous, all at the same time. As I am dealing with cancer, my beautiful daughter is taking her first steps. Life is just like that.

So I decided that checking out with drugs, alcohol, denial, or twelve hours of TV a day (pick your poison) was not an option for me. I decided that I needed to feel it all. I must admit that this can be exhausting. Sometimes, I would rather just sleep it all away in a haze of barbiturates. But I don't. Spring is here, my daughter is saying her first words, and my son is asking me Big Questions about the galaxy. I don't want to miss a thing.

Chromosomes, Monosomies and Miracles

Among cancer’s many gifts to me (such as bruises, baldness, and black humour), this disease has also provided me with an entirely new vocabulary. I now know impressively big words like neutrophils, posaconazole, and the infamous thrombocytopenia. (Try that one out at dinner parties.) But by far the craziest thing I’ve learned in the last few months is how bone marrow transplantation actually works.

When I was first diagnosed with leukemia, I was obviously devastated. But after some research, I thought that I would endure several horrible rounds of chemo, lose my hair, and then put this all behind me. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. A few weeks after my diagnosis, I found out that I have a monosomy. That means I’m missing a chromosome, and a fairly important one at that. So while the vast majority of human beings have 46 chromosomes, all of them quite critical to existence, I only have 45. I was not born this way, as a Chromosome 7 deficiency in utero causes all sorts of birth defects. Instead, at some point, somehow, for unknown reasons, my DNA started to self-destruct. You do not need to be a genetic expert to figure out that, without intervention, this will end badly.

With a little research, I quickly discovered that the prognosis for leukemia patients with a Chromosome 7 deletion is very poor. I fall into the “unfavourable cytogenetics” category. Several rounds of chemo might put me into remission, but not for long. The doctors told me that a bone marrow transplant is essentially my only shot. But it is also no guarantee. I found this annoyingly vague. What did that mean? How much more time would I get with this risky procedure? Five years? 10? 20? I’m only 32. I greedily want 50 more years.

I know, of course, that no one is guaranteed that kind of time. No one is even guaranteed a tomorrow, cancer or not. I also have a lot more people working to ensure that I’ll live another day than the average person does, so I take some comfort in that. (Seriously. Do the rest of you have multiple hematologists, an army of nurses, a naturopath, dietician, social worker, chiropractor and a counsellor? I sure hope not.)

Then I started researching bone marrow transplants and completely freaked out. Somehow I had never thought of it as such a dangerous and completely mind-boggling process. (Well, let’s be honest. Before this diagnosis, I had never thought of bone marrow transplants at all.)

For the donor, much to my relief, the process is fairly low risk. The stem cells or bone marrow, depending on the procedure, replenish themselves in a few weeks. Many donors go back to work the very next day, and they get to say they spent their day off saving someone's life. In my books, that is pretty incredible. (See www.onematch.com.)

For the recipient, however, the process is quite different. The chemo that they give you before a transplant is extremely toxic – far more vicious than what they usually use for cancer treatment. It completely kills off your entire immune system. Essentially, it kills you. In fact, the chemo kills off your bone marrow so thoroughly that it cannot come back. And then, in some cases, they also give you some radiation to finish things off. (I guess there’s dead and then there’s more dead.) After all of this, in order to survive, the recipient needs someone else’s bone marrow or stem cells.

Now you know why I freaked out. And it gets better.

In an organ transplant, you receive a new organ and your immune system can reject that organ. But in a bone marrow transplant, you receive someone else’s entire immune system. That means you get their blood type, their immunity, and even their allergies. The way I see it, the process essentially splices two humans together. (Disclaimer: This is my totally non-scientific interpretation of a very complex process.)

After the transplant, I will no longer be missing Chromosome 7, but it won’t be mine. I’ll still have part of my DNA, but I’ll also have someone else’s. A more nefarious person might consider committing a serious crime right before the transplant. Afterwards, the perpetrator would have different DNA and a new blood type – very difficult to track down. (Good thing I’m not nefarious.)

Once the transplant is done, instead of the risk of your body rejecting a foreign organ, this new immune system can reject and attack you. So with a few hours of research, I learned that the process designed to save my life could also kill me. Great. Didn’t someone once say that cancer was a snap? No? I must be thinking of a different four-letter word.

I also discovered that the majority of people who need bone marrow transplants never find a suitable donor, especially patients who are not Caucasian. Yet after all my bad luck with the cytogenetics, I finally got some good news last week: my doctors found multiple donor matches in the bone marrow registry. Hallelujah, baby! Scattered throughout the world, there are people who are as genetically close to me as my own brother. Not only that, but somewhere along the line, these people decided to sign up to be donors. And now at least one of them has been confirmed as willing, young, healthy, available, and a perfect match. This anonymous person, without knowing me at all, with no promise of rewards, accolades, or any sort of payment, is going to save my life.

Miraculous? I think so.

The Upside of Sick

I could bore you with a litany of all the things that are terrible about cancer, but that would do no good. Going over everything I hate about this situation makes me miserable, and sharing it will just make you depressed, and the last thing we need is more sad people. So, instead, I have decided to list some of the good things about being seriously ill. Yes, there are some. It is not all nausea and fatigue and bruises and dry mouth. Here are just a few of the perks:

1. You now have an excuse out of anything at any time. Literally anything. When you get severe dizzy spells and spontaneous nose bleeds, no one is going to nag you about your underwear on the floor. Don’t feel like putting your bowl in the dishwasher? Cancer. Don’t want to change a poopy diaper? Cancer. Once you feel better, people will forget that you were sick and these perks will go away, so I say use them while you can.

2. You can completely reinvent yourself. You’ve already lost your hair, so you have a new look anyway. Always wanted to dress like a rocker chick? Do it. Hate your job but were always too afraid to quit? Walk away. Always wanted a tattoo? Get it. (But wait until you have blood cells again.) Change everything and anything you want. After cancer, no one is going to question your desire to overhaul whatever time you have left. Cancer is the best “get out of jail/school/job” card you could ever play.

3. You will get so thin that you can wear anything. You know how they say you can’t lose weight unless you work for it? Not true! Chemo will kick those last five, ten, or 15 pounds off your frame like no boot camp ever could. So now you can rock those skinny jeans and all it took was a boatload of toxic chemicals pumped into your veins. The downside of this, of course, is that your super skinny self will be far too weak to strut. A catheter in your chest also puts a serious damper on bikini season. So just stay seated and keep your shirt on, and no one will be the wiser.

4. You will save a small fortune on haircuts, highlights, hairspray, shampoo and all things hair-related. Get a good wig, and you have perfect hair every day in about five seconds. I now laugh in the face of humidity.

5. You will have a very sudden, unexpected respite from all duties and deadlines. If you are a type-A personality like me, this may bring a strange sort of relief. Before cancer, I was drowning in PhD deadlines and driven to always be better and work harder. In less than a week that was all taken away. While the sense of loss was difficult, the shift into a mindful, restful existence where no one expects anything of me has been a surprising gift. A nurse, however, pointed out to me that most people are more stressed, not less, when they get a cancer diagnosis. I’m more relaxed now than I’ve been in years. Interesting.

6. No one has to hold back your hair when you puke. Ok, admittedly this is not a great perk, but it did come to mind the other night during a particularly bad bout of nausea. Sometimes it’s the little things.

7. Finally, you will (hopefully) be overwhelmed by how many people care about you. I will never be able to thank all of the people who have donated money, meals, and time to help us, not to mention all of the supportive emails, cards and gifts that I have received. If I ever thought I was alone, I never will again. There are people praying for me on nearly every continent. It is astonishing and incredibly humbling. We shouldn’t need serious illness to bring us together, but maybe sometimes we do.

There you have it. Seven good things about being sick. I may be crawling up the stairs, I may have no white blood cells, but I don’t have to do dishes and I look great in leggings.

That’s something, right?

Coming Home

After five weeks in the hospital, coming home was a delightful but strange experience. While being in the hospital was hard in more ways than I could have imagined, coming home also presented challenges that I did not expect.

In the hospital, I had endless hours to read, write, journal, do yoga, watch mindless television -- all of those things that a full-time parent/full-time student never has time to do. On the flip side, I had horrible hospital food, a perpetual IV tether, limited mobility, and the nonstop invasion of doctors, nurses, cleaning staff, physiotherapists and social workers into my room.

But at home, the day starts with shrieking. Not angry shrieking, just the results of my 11-month-old delightfully experimenting with her vocal range, and my preschooler egging her on. Peaceful meditation is out. As soon as I come downstairs, they are all over me. I can barely get breakfast without one kid hanging onto my ankles and the other one shoving a book into my face, demanding that I read. I get the impression that they might have missed me, just a little bit.

And then there is the inevitable chaos of home. Dishes, laundry, toys, and seemingly endless clutter… things that are all much easier to ignore while in the hospital. Now nothing is how I left it and all I want to do was tidy and redecorate, but having no blood cells puts a damper on those sorts of tasks.

So for the first week, I accepted the mess. I embraced the noise. I did nothing but sit with the kids and let them climb on me. My daughter followed me everywhere saying: “Mama! Mama!” and refused to let me put her down. My son wanted to show me all of his toys again, as though I must have forgotten all about the cool Duplo and spy Playmobil while I was gone.

Then I started realizing that I hadn’t written in my journal in days. Yoga had gone by the wayside, writing this blog was not happening. Surely there must be a way to balance the monotonous silence of the hospital with the insanity of two very loud (and messy) young children at home.

And then I found the solution. A locked door, a loud fan, earplugs and (if needed) some Gravol. I guarantee that will put you into a kid-free, blissful haze like nothing else. Now this should go without saying, but if your kids are really young and you don’t have someone else watching them, this may not be the best course of action for you. Or maybe it is. I shall not judge.

I felt guilty about this at first, after being away from my children for so long, but there is no healing without rest. If I don’t learn that now, I never will. I love my family more than anything, but being climbed on all day long when your body is just barely recovering is not the way to get better. (Crawling up the stairs with low blood pressure and two kids pulling at your feet is also just begging for a catastrophic accident.) So at some point every day, I lock the door and sleep and read. Maybe soon I’ll start to write more. For now this will have to do.

Oh Child of Mine...

Most people treat you differently when you get cancer, but not your own children. Your own kids might shriek with joy when you arrive and cry when you leave, but they will also throw fits and misbehave just like any other day. They will make you feel like nothing has ever changed. And believe me, if you happen to be wallowing in self-pity, nothing will bring you out faster than a precocious three-year-old.

I was at home the other day on a precious leave of absence from the hospital. The first few times I had been home, my son would sob for me to stay, which of course always made me cry. So on this particular visit, I was dreading the emotional departure. We were eating dinner, and my son looked up at me with his big gorgeous eyes.

“Mommy, are you leaving soon?”

Bracing for the outburst, I nodded. “Yes, baby, I have to go back to the hospital for more medicine.”

He shrugged.  “Ok.”

Surprised by his nonchalance, I asked: “Why, honey? Do you want me to go to the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you want Mommy to go back to the hospital?”

 “Because then I get to watch Cars.”

My husband, in an attempt to stave off another fit about my departure, had promised him that they would watch Cars together after I left. My son might love me and miss me terribly, but the promise of animated talking cars is still way cooler than Mommy.

A few days later, he didn’t want my mom to leave (he has been having a very hard time with anyone leaving lately). He asked her why she had to go to the hospital too. She said it was so that Mommy didn’t have to be all alone.

His response? “Mommy’s not alone. She has all the doctors and nurses to keep her company.”

Oh child of mine. I love you madly.

I Am Not Cancer

Many strange things happen when you are diagnosed with the big C. First, you feel like you are ejected from life. Suddenly deadlines don’t matter, jobs are unimportant, and everything you’ve been trying to accomplish drops away. As we drove home for one last visit with my kids before I started chemo, I watched everyone go about their daily lives, getting coffee, going running, buying groceries, and I was no longer a part of that. My life was ripped out from under me. I couldn’t kiss my son goodnight. I could no longer breastfeed my infant daughter. Everything was left unfinished.

Overnight, no one treats you like you anymore. Everyone is extra nice. Family and friends say “I love you” more often, they bring lattes and ice cream, they feed your children, and they even clean your house. This, I realize, is one of the biggest perks of being hospitalized: no more housework.

But as nice as people are, they also look at you like you’re dying. People treat you gently, like you are about to break. No one knows exactly what to say. But it’s ok to make bad jokes and laugh uproariously, even when you have cancer. Especially when you have cancer. Serious illness is scary and terrible and puts death right in your face. We have to laugh or we’ll never make it. Like one of my childhood friends recently said to me: cancer steals from you, no matter what the outcome. And one thing that cancer will try to steal is joy.

Cancer, of course, also steals your hair. (Well, technically it’s chemo that does that, but the end result is the same.) I realize that this may be different for everyone, but I was particularly attached to my long, curly blonde hair. When I started pulling it out in clumps, I sobbed. So I chopped it all off, just like the cancer-stricken heroine in a really dramatic film. Except that once it was all off, instead of crying hysterically, I couldn’t stop giggling. I looked like an electrocuted baby chick.[1] Right in time for Easter.

Then I realized that this is one more thing that cancer tries to steal: your identity. When strangers see your bald head, they think “cancer” before anything else. Instead of seeing you, people see illness. Suddenly, you are "that girl who got cancer," instead of everything else you’ve worked so hard to be. In the hospital you are a patient, put into the same blue gown as everyone else, often reduced to cell counts and prognoses and “unfavourable cytogenetics” (my own personal favourite).

But I am not my prognosis. I am not cancer.

And I don’t wear hospital gowns anymore.

---

[1] I must thank Sallie Astor Burdine, author of Who Needs Hair, for this particular image.

Someone else's life

This is the beginning of what I had hoped would be a short journey. Now it looks like I might be in for a fairly long haul. But I have never been one to quit something just because it is hard, so here we go.

I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia on March 8, 2012. I have an amazing husband of nearly nine years, and together we have two children: a son who is nearly four, and a daughter who is 10 months old.

Needless to say, leukemia was not in my plan for 2012. In fact, I had enormous plans for 2012. I am halfway through a PhD in Political Science, specializing in children in armed conflict, and I had just transferred from Carleton University to the University of Minnesota, one of the top political science programs in the United States. I was planning to go to Minnesota in April to complete an exam and get my research proposal approved. Then we were going to spend the summer packing up our home, practicing Spanish, and preparing to move to Quito, Ecuador, where I would conduct my fieldwork for eight to 12 months.

That was my plan. Clearly, this is someone else's.

In February, I was snowboarding with my brothers and running up the hills around Vancouver. In March, I was hospitalized in Ottawa with extremely low blood counts, a raging fever, deep cough, sinus infection, and multiple other problems. I was put on anti-virals, two different antibiotics, and anti-fungal medication (among other drugs). I had a broncoscopy, two chest x-rays, a CT scan, an ultrasound, and a central line called a Hickman catheter inserted into my chest. (This last procedure I opted to do without sedation so I could see my kids immediately afterwards, and I have to say, I would not recommend doing that.) And all of this happened only one week after my husband returned from several months overseas.

Now I am not one to whine, but this was by far the scariest thing I had ever experienced. I have always scoffed at the TV show House because I never believed that multiple doctors would ever be attending one single patient. Yet there I was, with four doctors in my room, all looking dramatically grim. No one knew what was wrong with me, or if they did, they weren't telling. Until they did. It was acute leukemia. In a few days I would have to start chemo. My mind went numb. The doctor was still talking but all I heard was "leukemia." I thought that it must be a mistake, that this must be someone else's life.

First of all, I am not the kind of person who is supposed to get cancer. I eat ridiculously healthy things like quinoa and kale. I use organic, chemical-free lotions and make-up. I run daily, and I run hard. I do yoga, I lift weights, I take vitamins, and I drink tons of water. Admittedly, my life was overloaded with stress, but still... in those lists of "how to prevent cancer," I could check off almost every item. And yet, there I was, on the leukemia ward fighting for my life.

Cancer, it turns out, does not necessarily care if you eat kale.

Meanwhile, I had been put on isolation due to my chest infection, and that meant that all of my visitors had to wear gloves and masks with visors. My children were not (and still are not) allowed to visit, and I was not allowed to leave my room. The physiotherapist saw my eyes go a little wild at the thought of being so confined, and she kindly brought a stationary bike into my room. So every morning, through the chemo and afterwards, I dragged my IV pole over to the window, put on my ipod with my favourite running mix, and got on the bike. Moving made me feel more human, like I was still part of the living, like I was still me.

Yet I also had to giggle at how ridiculous it all was. There I was, listening to music that I used to run with daily, and wearing shoes that I had worn when I broke 20 minutes in a 5k race. And now I was pedalling slowly on a stationary bike, in my hospital gown, attached to an IV dumping poison into my veins. So much for that organic diet.

But I am still here. And I am still moving. I will not be taken down so easily.