Cracking Myself Up

Maybe it’s just me, but this whole “conquering setbacks and coming back a stronger person” thing is getting a bit old. Can we all agree that it’s time for some smooth sailing?

I had my bone scan on Friday, complete with a heart-stopping experience when the technician came to me halfway through and asked, “You don’t have a history of cancer, do you?” My stomach immediately turned to liquid as I said yes, and she said, “Oh.” Then she disappeared for ten minutes. My brain exploded with all the things this could possibly mean. Why did she ask me that? Did she see something on the scan she’s not telling me? Do I have some kind of bone cancer now? Is this not a running injury at all? Is this why I’m not getting better? What is that white blob on the left side of my pelvis on the image screen? Is that a tumour? (Cue hyperventilation and conclusion-jumping.)

Thankfully it turned out just to be a routine screening question, but they did give me an additional total body scan, “just in case.” Comforting. Thanks for giving me ten minutes of all out panic.

This is not my pelvis, but it's the same injury. Ouch.

On Monday, my family doctor called me. I’m sort of getting used to doctors calling me at home (that’s probably not a good sign, right?). She told me that she had my scan results, and they showed a stress fracture on my pelvis.

Huh. That explains a lot. (But to be honest, I was so relieved it wasn't a tumour that a fracture didn't seem all that bad.)

As it turns out, I’ve been walking around with a pelvic fracture for three months. Days of endless walking around Paris, lugging suitcases up and down stairs, hauling my two-year-old around on my hip, twisting and pulling myself into yoga poses, doing squats with heavy weights and plyometrics at the gym, attempting (and failing) to run over and over again…all of these things cannot have been particularly good for my healing. And that’s probably why it still hurts, even though such a fracture should theoretically heal within six to eight weeks (so says the almighty Internet).

In my defence, I had no idea that I was broken. Well, I had an inkling. When the injury first happened, it distinctly felt like bone pain, not muscle pain. But when I asked various health practitioners if it could be a stress fracture, nobody thought it was, so I eventually convinced myself it wasn’t. Lesson learned: trust your instincts. I should have advocated for myself more strongly and insisted on a bone scan sooner. This is where my pain threshold does not serve me well. In my frame of reference, my pain was a five or six out of ten, so because I wasn’t in excruciating pain, nobody thought “fracture.”

Now I know that many of you are taking a deep breath and ready to dole out an “I told you so.” Save it. I know when I’ve made training errors, but this time I did everything right. I increased training gradually, I didn’t increase speed and mileage in the same week, I did strength training and yoga to deal with muscle imbalances. I had my coach check out my form and training plan. I ate well. I took calcium and Vitamin D. But radiation is a killer of bone, and I came out of that hospital with osteopenia – a precursor to osteoporosis. My body felt ready, but deep inside it wasn’t. So I broke.

I'm now on a bone-building mission.

Did I know that I had osteopenia before embarking on such a tough training regime? I did. And yes, I did indeed “push it.” But running and weight bearing are good for your bones, and I had all of my doctors’ blessings to do what I was doing. (On a side note, you know you have problems when you have at least six different doctors and you know the names of your pharmacist’s kids and where they go on holiday.)

I guess you just don’t know you’re going to break until you do.

Now, knowing full well that many people would click their tongues and shake their heads and say, “Oh Rachel, she went and overdid it again,” I asked what I did wrong. After reviewing my training leading up to the injury, the sports medicine doctor said to me, “If you run a lot, you’re going to get injured. Period. And pelvic stress fractures are just one of those injuries. They happen to people who have perfectly healthy bones. You are at higher risk and just had bad luck. You regroup, get better and move on.”

In other words, your pity party is over, madam.

My husband had similar insight: “Look, you could use the elliptical three times a week and stay healthy and never get injured. But you wouldn’t be happy. If you’re going to drive your body like a race car, it’s going to break down a lot more often.”  I guess that explains why I have a pit crew.

Indeed. Couch potatoes rarely get athletic injuries. I’m happiest when I’m training hard and I’m most unhappy when I’m injured. Yet the two cannot really exist without each other. Ask any competitive athlete, professional or amateur.

So what now? The only thing you can really do for a fracture is wait. (And if you know me, you know how awesomely patient I am.) So I can postpone and do the race in 2015 (the doctor's recommendation), or I can keep training and aim for participation rather than competition (recommended by my physiotherapist and a triathlon coach I greatly respect). After my initial dismay, I realized that a fracture is better than a muscle tear or even the suspected bone inflammation, because it heals better and faster. A fracture sounds worse, but it actually isn’t. I will be able to run by race day. Whether I will be able to run fast is another matter entirely.

But at this point, does that really matter? Even if I crawl across the finish line, won’t I still have done it?

On the flight out to BC yesterday, I was watching ET Canada (nothing makes you feel better than watching the train wreck of other people's lives). But I was shaken out of my trash TV indulgence by the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who recently died of a brain tumour. Instead of "why me", I suddenly thought, why her and not me? And I finally remembered that this race was never about me at all. It’s about making life just a little bit better for others suffering from cancer. It’s about contributing dollars to research that can help people live longer and better. It’s about running and swimming and cycling for everyone who can’t. It really doesn’t matter how fast I do it, it just matters that I do it, celebrating life the entire way.

I was reading an old journal entry from last fall, and what I found there was another massive reality check (a common occurrence when you rarely have your feet planted on the ground). At that time, I was worried about blood counts, graft-versus-host disease, pneumonia, and making it to one hundred days post-transplant. Now I’m worried about whether or not I can race a triathlon as fast as I would like? I would say that’s quite a step up in one year.

Wait, did I just get a life lesson from this injury? Oh dear. I might just be learning something after all.

***

If you want to support my endeavour, please consider donating to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society HERE. Sponsor me before December 31 and get a tax receipt for 2013.

Mythology

It's been too long since my last post, and for that I apologize. I’ve had a rough week. Well, a rough few weeks, to be more accurate. I’ve lost my iPod, my phone, my wallet, my padlock, my planner, my gloves, my motivation, my water bottle, my hard drive, my temper, and an entire chapter of my book. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t lost my children somewhere along the way. A few of those things I’ve managed to recover, but not all of them.

I would love to chalk it up to chemo brain, but when I mentioned this to my doctor, she disagreed. “You’re just exhausted,” she said. Fingers in a few too many pies. You’d think after cancer that I’d learn, that I’d be more enlightened, more aware of my limitations and my tendencies to take on too much. 

You’d think.

The happy dance I'd like to have.

See, I really thought that after cancer I would become a better person. I think it is part of the mythology of survivorship. There is this misconception that since we’ve faced death and survived, we’ll come out the other side more patient, more joyful, more calm, less hurried – in other words, better. There are countless books perpetuating this myth, so when one does survive cancer and does not come out the other side automatically enlightened, calm, and amazingly joyful, it can feel like a bit of a failure. When I am not happy every day, I am frustrated with myself, because I feel that I should be happy. I survived leukemia for crying out loud. Every day should be a happy dance.

Right.

But let’s back up for a second. I need to tell you a little story. First, I finally got my pony. Thanks to the generosity of Euro-Sports and the creative budgeting of my husband, I was able to land a beautiful new road bike at a fairly low cost. Even better, I managed to pick it up right before the snow fell and ended the road riding season. I got exactly one ride outside on my new steed, and it was glorious.

My first and only outdoor ride on my new pony.
(Yes it was cold.)

Then I went to see a sports medicine doctor, who told me that it might take up to a year for this running injury to heal. If she is right, then a triathlon in March is not a possibility. I have a bone scan on Friday to know for sure. So suddenly I was looking at the possibility of another race down the drain. And I was going right back to the beginning. One minute of running, one minute of walking. After spending a year working so hard to get my fitness and muscle back, this was devastating. How many more setbacks must I have? I cried right there in her office. (And no, she didn’t hug me.)

I gave myself two days to have a pity party. I cried, I wandered the house in a daze, I stopped answering my phone, I whined incessantly to my husband (yes, he deserves your sympathy). I served spaghetti with sauce from a jar for dinner. Twice. Then my kids got sick and started puking everywhere (hopefully not from the spaghetti), which only further extended my little party for one. Honestly, I thought as I wiped vomit off my clothes for the third time, don’t I deserve a break by now?

But one does not survive leukemia and a bone marrow transplant and multiple life-threatening infections to be taken down by a running injury. At least that's the mythology. We are survivors. Nothing is as bad as cancer. We are tough as nails. (Right?)

What a "home gym" looks like around here.

I got home and stared down the road bike that we couldn’t really afford, that I might not really need, because I might not be able to do the race anyway. This diagnosis also meant I was looking at three weeks in BC over the holidays where I could not run. Three weeks of family and Christmas craziness and warmer temperatures, and no running. (Can you hear the ominous drumming of my impending doom?)

And then winter came with a vengeance. Since I cannot run and don’t cross-country ski, all my exercise became an indoor endeavour. Full disclosure: I am not a winterized Canadian. Even though I have lived in the Ottawa area for eight years, I was born and raised in the Vancouver area, where it usually only snows in the mountains (where it belongs). So inevitably, when the winter cold hits around here, with no real mountains to snowboard on, I get a little grumpy. And then I chastise myself for being grumpy. Because at least I’m not in the hospital, right? How could anyone who survived cancer ever be ungrateful about anything after that?

And this is where the mythology hits again. Should cancer survivors be grateful and joyful and embrace every delicious second of life, every single day? (“Hooray! I’m so grateful that I had enough energy to run hard and get injured! Three cheers for injuries!”)

Maybe we should. But even though I am a chimera and probably a mutant from all that radiation, I’m still mostly human, and I still get bummed out. So every time I am unhappy or stressed or depressed, I feel guilty because I “should” be happier. And then I get stressed that the stress is going to bring back the cancer, which stresses me out even more (you follow me?). I have set myself up to be this inspirational story, but often I do not feel very inspirational. I sometimes yell at my kids. I growl at my husband. My floors are dirty (really dirty). I skip workouts. I hardly ever meditate. I don’t create anything worthy of Pinterest. I drink too much coffee and wine. I lose things all the time. Often I feel like I’m just barely getting by.

Why am I admitting this to you? Because cancer doesn’t automatically make anyone a better person. And surviving it doesn’t automatically give you a better life or a clearer purpose. I wish it did. But we have to choose what to do with our scars. Sometimes we rise above them and become the inspirational story we want to be, and sometimes they swallow us whole. And sometimes both of those things can happen in the same week.

It has been nearly eighteen months since my transplant, and while most days feel pretty normal, some days I go down a black hole of anger from which I struggle to crawl out. “Why me?” rears its very ugly head, and then I berate myself for the indulgent whining, because I have been blessed with so much.

I got on the bike yesterday, pedalled for twelve minutes and then quit. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that this is very uncharacteristic of me. There are very few workouts that I have started and not finished. I've done two hour sessions on the trainer. But I just couldn’t do it. My brain and my body were not communicating. Nothing was firing. And I gave up.

I know. Never give up, right? But sometimes I do. There, I said it. Myth shattered.

Cancer happens to all kinds of people. Nice people, mean people, young people, old people, rich people, poor people, healthy people, sick people. Anyone at all. And the experience might make us better. But it might also make us angry, bitter, hurt, and sad. I heard someone say the other day, “You know, I bet when they look back at it, some people are glad that they got cancer, because of how it changed things.” I nearly screamed (and then I reminded myself that a more enlightened person does not scream at others). Yes indeed, I'm so glad that I got cancer and that my life blew up, that my kids were traumatized, that my husband didn't sleep for a year, that we spent a small fortune on supplements and medication, and that my body was permanently damaged. I want to rip all that “cancer is a gift” nonsense into a million little pieces. (Clearly I have a lot of work to do in the Zen department.)

For some of us, it takes much longer to recover mentally and spiritually than it does to recover physically. Just because we survived doesn’t automatically make us heroes, or even good people. We are all deeply flawed, and I think most of us fall just as often as we rise above. I am thankful every day for the forgiveness of others.

I’d like to think that surviving such an aggressive cancer has made me tough. I’d like to think I’m pretty hardcore. Badass even. That is the mythology, isn’t it? That I “kicked cancer’s butt” and thus am unstoppable? But I’m exhausted. Injured. Hungry. And human (mostly).

So you see, when it all comes down to it, I'm really not a hero. I'm just a woman who needs some sleep. And maybe a sandwich.

I think it's time to show my couch some love.

The Ride

I went for a ride with Rick Hellard of Zone 3 Sports last Tuesday. Rick is somewhat of a triathlon celebrity here in Ottawa and beyond. He has raced in the Kona Ironman World Championships multiple times, and he coaches some of the best triathletes in Ottawa. I have heard stories about him for years, as he coached one of my good friends for her first Ironman. He is also the running coach for Team in Training, which is how we met. When I asked him to go for coffee to talk triathlons (since I essentially know nothing about the sport except “swim bike run”), he suggested that we go for a ride instead.


Gulp. 

“Um…well… but I’m slow.” I said carefully. My mind raced to my borrowed, too-small bike and my flat pedals, sneakers (horrors) and decidedly uncool cycling gear. Not to mention my utter lack of experience on the bike. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that,” he said.

“No, I’m serious. I’m really slow.”

“I don’t hear what you’re saying right now. What time should we meet?”

So that was that. We were going for a ride.

My new heroes.
Give them some love and check out their shop.

In a panic, I headed straight for Euro-sports, where one of the kind-hearted owners, Jon Palframan, had taken sympathy for my cause and offered to give me a deal on equipment. I went in and told him I needed clipless pedals and cleats. Right now. No way was I showing up for my ride with Rick Hellard in running shoes and flat pedals. I'm no expert, but I knew that was a definite "avoid at all costs" situation. I had bought road shoes in the summer for a ridiculous deal at the Great Glebe Garage Sale ($200 shoes for $20!), so at least I had those. Never mind that I had never worn them. Jon didn’t charge me for the pedals and gave me a sweet deal on the cleats and booties (to save my feet from freezing). He is awesome.

So I was set. I had new clipless pedals, and I had exactly no time to get used to them before our ride. I envisioned myself rolling up to meet Rick, not being able to get my foot out in time, and sprawling out on the pavement at his feet. This was going to be epic.

“Just make sure you unclip before you stop moving,” was my husband’s sage advice. No kidding.

On the morning of our scheduled ride, I woke up to gale force winds. Now not only would I fall over in my new pedals, I was going to get blown into the ditch by the wind. (My bike handling skills are not stellar.) I headed to the pool, realizing as I jumped into the water that maybe a swim workout on the same day that I was going for a ride with Rick was not the best idea. But I would be OK, right? I mean, swimming is a lot of upper body and who needs upper body strength on a bike ride? (As it turns out, everyone.)

As I came home from dropping off my daughter, Rick gave me a call to say he was stuck in traffic and would have to reschedule our ride. "That's fine with me!" I heard myself chirp in a voice much higher than my own. I wouldn’t be killed by the wind and pedals after all. But I still needed to fit in a workout that day.

I'm only smiling because the workout is almost over.

I called my husband and asked him to send me instructions of how to set up my bike on the trainer in the basement.

“Just go to the gym,” was his reply. Oh ye of little faith.

“At the gym, I have to watch baking shows on the Food Network. You want me to ride for over an hour watching Baking with Anna?! Do you care about my sanity at all?" (I'm not making this up. They really do play the Food Network in front of all the cardio machines.)

He relented and sent me patronizing instructions  like "use a screwdriver" (thank God he mentioned that, because my fingernails weren't working). It was nice to prove to my husband that I could indeed use tools without his help (we won't mention all the little mishaps along the way, and the fact that I was talking, er, yelling, at the trainer to get it to cooperate). But seriously, there is a lot to learn in this crazy sport of cycling.

Rick and I rescheduled our ride for last Tuesday. Thankfully by then I had done two rides in Gatineau Park with my new pedals, so I was feeling a little more confident. I still had no idea how to fix a flat tire, so I just prayed that I wouldn’t get one.

When I rolled up, Rick was already waiting, looking every bit the professional triathlon coach that he is. I felt a little intimidated and amateurish in my logo-free tights, Lululemon running jacket, and headband over my ears, beneath my mountain bike helmet (I took the visor off). So very uncool.

We headed off into the hills, and he was exceedingly patient with me. He gave me great tips about shifting and pedalling techniques, and it was obvious he loved the sport and liked being a coach. At one point, as I gasped up to the top of a hill where he was waiting, I said to him: “See? I told you I was slow!”

Ever the lovely, generous man, Rick said: “No, actually, you are way better than I thought you’d be. You are doing just fine. You could ride with just about anyone out here.”

A cyclist and trail runner in the making.

Now I know he was probably just being nice, but still. It’s always good to hear that you are not quite as bad as you (or someone else) thought you were. We finished the ride a solid ten minutes faster than I had done the same loop by myself on Sunday. I guess the right company really can make you better.

As I arrived back home, elated with how everything had gone, I reached into my pocket for the garage door opener and felt nothing. I looked at my unzipped pocket and swallowed a few four-letter words, realizing that the opener was likely lost somewhere in the Gatineau hills. I patted every other pocket. Nothing. Just as I became certain that I was locked out, my son’s bus pulled up. 

I was tired, cold, and starving after a two-hour ride, with an exhausted five-year-old and a daughter stuck at daycare. And no keys. I ransacked my son’s lunchbag and found a banana and granola bar (which I inhaled without shame), and then knocked on our lovely neighbour’s door and asked to take refuge from the cold. Tea never tasted so good. 

Thank God I had my cell phone, and that my husband actually picked up his work phone (not always a given). He gallantly jumped on his bike and made record time back home to let me in, and I managed to pick up my daughter on time. In spandex.

What did I learn from this day? A good bike ride can make you forget about cancer. Nice people are everywhere. I'm stronger than I thought. If you become a cyclist, get used to lots of spandex. And zip your pockets.

And never, ever schedule an early swim workout the morning after a tough bike ride.

Ouch.

Some Kind of Reason

 

Did I get cancer so that I'd go to France? No.
 Did I go to France because I got cancer? Yes.

No matter who you are or where you live, at some point in your life, something bad has happened to you. Maybe not as bad as what happened to me (I hope), but something unfortunate has occurred, of that I’m certain. And I’m fairly confident that at some point during this bad event, someone told you that “everything happens for a reason.”

Now, depending on what was going on at the time, you either found that comforting or wildly annoying. Perhaps a bit of both.

For a cancer survivor, this one simple little phrase can be the source of endless angst and debate. If everything happens for a reason, then why did I get cancer? What am I supposed to learn from this? What did I do to make this happen? Why would God be so cruel to me? How can I make sure this never happens again? How can I make sure this doesn’t happen to my kids, or my husband, or my parents?

When I was first diagnosed with leukemia, I made myself crazy trying to figure out what caused it (never mind that the doctors told me it was impossible to know). Before cancer, I exercised, I ate right, I did yoga, I tried to avoid toxins as much as possible. So what went wrong? Was it because I drank from a hose as a child? Was it from eating disgusting raw animal products during a “Fear Factor” night at a pub when I was nineteen and stupid? (True story – I still shudder to think about it). Was it the aerial spraying against mosquitoes that happened in our area every year? Was it some undetected virus that I contracted while traveling in South America? Was it the insane levels of stress I was under due to graduate school and infants who didn’t sleep and a husband who was overseas? Was it something during my pregnancy that suppressed my immune system and allowed cancer cells to thrive? Or was it all of the above?

What was it? For months, I nearly made myself insane.

And then came the moment that I think all cancer patients arrive at eventually: I don’t know why this happened, but I’d better learn something so that it doesn’t happen again. As if we could prevent what was unpreventable the first time around.

Now that I’m out of the acute illness phase, I have come to recognize a few things.

1. Not everything happens for a good reason.

When people say, “Well, it must have happened for a reason,” they are implying that there must be something essential to learn from the terrible event that we couldn't learn any other way, or some bigger plan that necessitated a life-threatening disease with permanent side effects. Does God give people cancer so we can learn life lessons? I honestly don’t think so. Did I learn some big life lessons? Of course. But that had more to do with how I chose to respond to the situation than the actual cause of the situation. More likely, I got cancer because we are systematically and unapologetically poisoning ourselves and our planet. That’s a reason all right, just not a good one.

2. People have a desperate need to make sense of inexplicable situations.

When I was diagnosed, it was a shock to everyone I knew. I was the last person on earth who should have got cancer. Because of my extra-healthy lifestyle and no history of cancer in my family, many people I knew were scrambling to make this diagnosis make sense. There must be a reason. We are driven by a need to explain things, to make life make sense. But if you get cancer out of the blue, you know that life is not at all fair and doesn’t always make sense. A lot of people landed on stress as the cause. It was the one thing I wasn’t doing “right,” so it must have been the stress. Sure, maybe stress exacerbated the situation and caused an acidic environment that allowed cancer to thrive. Maybe. But did it cause my cancer? It’s doubtful. Otherwise every stressed person on earth would have cancer. And it essentially meant that, despite my healthy life, it was still my fault that I got cancer, which, as a side note, is not something you should generally say to someone who is dying. We feel terrible enough without being kicked in the teeth with “it’s your fault.”

3. Once you’ve had cancer, you can stop justifying your choices.

Yoga on the French Riviera? Yep.

Obviously cancer doesn’t give you carte blanche to be an idiot (or a jerk). If you’re doing that, stop it. What I mean is, if you get sick and decide to overhaul your life, if you decide that your Type-A, overachiever life just doesn’t jive with your exhausted post-cancer self, let it go. It doesn’t mean that you got cancer because God decided you needed to change your ways. It just means that you’re choosing to learn from a hellish experience, and life is too precious to waste being stressed to your eyeballs. My life has much more space in it now for things I love, like yoga and writing and friends, and especially for my family. Did I think I’d ever be a yoga teacher and a health and wellness consultant before cancer? Of course not. Do I think I got cancer so that I would change direction and become those things? Of course not. But I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six, and I’m finally getting back to that. To me, that's no small thing. At times I miss debating world events with other smart and ambitious people. But in this new life, I don’t spend every Saturday buried in academic journals and debates on war. I’m a lot happier. Do I feel like I’m letting myself and others down by not finishing my PhD? I do. But that’s not a good enough reason. And I’ve stopped justifying my choices. I had cancer. End of story.

Do I believe that everything happens for a reason? I do. But I don’t always believe that the reason is some ethereal, spiritual, divine intervention. Maybe sometimes it is, but often it’s not. And I think by attributing unexplained cancers to cosmic reasons or individual faults, we are shirking responsibility for what really causes them: us. Not necessarily as individuals, but as a collective whole. We cannot keep polluting our water, air, food, and bodies (and babies) the way we are, and expect anything to change. Instead of finding and preventing the real reasons for many cancers, we are scrambling to repair people once they are already broken.

Pretending to run

I got a hip flexor injury in August and wasn’t able to run (still can’t). Because of that, I started cycling and swimming and decided that a triathlon was an excellent idea (and then I panicked, but that's a different post). Did I get injured because the Forces That Be wanted me to see the light and switch to triathlons? No. I got injured because I was stupid and trained too hard, too fast, too soon. But instead of wallowing, I chose to do something great with a not-so-great situation. (See? Cancer is awesome for the life lessons.)

We can make ourselves crazy trying to find the reasons for bad things. Or we can just accept that our world is broken and poisoned and people are imperfect and bad things happen to good people all the time. I distinctly remember getting a chest x-ray during my hospital stay and resenting the x-ray technician for being healthy and alive and able to do her job. Why was she OK and I was the one with leukemia? No fair, I thought. And then she told me that her five-year-old son was in the children's hospital getting his third round of chemo. We all have our battles. Sometimes they are not immediately apparent, but they are always there.

I, for one, am going to stop asking why Bad Things happened to me. There's no good answer.

The better question is: What am I going to do about it now?