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.

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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.