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.