Cancer in the time of Covid-19
The morning after I was diagnosed with breast cancer I woke up and wished that I could go back to sleep. Back to the innocence of dreams. Back to a time when my life was not completely shattered. I reluctantly woke that day and the hot tears stung in my still swollen eyes and dampened the crisp hotel sheets on our Disney vacation. I knew I would never again wake up in the blissful, naive, youthful state that was my precancerous life.
It’s been a few months and I still wake up each day and mourn for my old life. The gravity of our new reality pushes back my wakefulness and dampens my urge to percolate with my coffee. Cancer treatment hangs over my daily routine like a shroud and robs me of the simplest joys and comforts of my morning routine.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that I can’t wash my hair normally, and when I do it still sheds an alarming amount. Trying to style dirty, thin, dry hair hits me with a wave of depression and anger each day. Especially now that everyone on social media is complaining about their roots with salons being closed. These are first world problems I would love to have. My hair is falling out and I won’t be able to do anything to it for 8-12 weeks after my last chemo, which is still two months away.
I imagine that folks who are not living in a post-cancer-diagnosis-reality might be feeling anxiety as the outbreak of COVID-19 rips through the world. It’s hard to get out of bed when life as you know it is irreversibly changed without your consent.
As tempted as I am to tell every single cancer muggle I know to “stay positive” or offer some bullshit terrible advice that people have told me like “everything happens for a reason,” I know better, so it’s my responsibility to be better. I have found a shred of solidarity in knowing humanity in general is also having a super shitty 2020. There’s something to be said about folks bound together by a common experience.
When the pandemic is over everyone else will return to their lives and experience a sense of “normal” again. Even though “normal” will never quite be the same as what it was before this viral outbreak, there will be a powerful shared sense of experience and of adapting to a new way of living. We will rebuild society and the economy and try to draw lessons from the devastation the virus left in its quake. I’ll share in this, to some extent.
But I will never get to return to the life I had before cancer. My normal life ended for good on December 19, 2019.
When I was first diagnosed I explained to folks how I searched for other young cancer survivors to commiserate with. Having cancer young is isolating. Heavy and complicated feelings about life and death haunt us every day. Even our best friends and spouses cannot relate to the dark and lonely places our minds wander. Folks who have never been diagnosed with cancer playfully moan and groan about birthdays and getting older. As cancer survivors, we look at our kids and our hearts cling to hope that we will have the exquisite fortune of living when our kids experience life’s grandest milestones. Outwardly, I remain sunny and strong to the world per usual, but fears have invaded the back of my mind and are squatting there despite my futile efforts to evict them. At least for a while I had a sense of comradery with other cancer survivors. Now, I find myself in a new subset of ugly circumstances, cancer treatment during a global pandemic.
One of the silver linings of cancer is that friends and family show up for their patient friends in a big way. When I started cancer treatment I leaned into my family and friends. I have never been to an appointment alone. My chemo treatments were so crowded sometimes that my friends stood in the room for hours or sat beside me in a hospital bed while I got one of the scariest injections known to humankind. I had cards, meals, and gifts delivered to my home nonstop for two months. I was terrified and battered by treatment, but I was never alone.
It’s a cancer right of passage to ring a bell at the end of a course of treatment of chemotherapy or radiation, symbolizing the completion of a grueling round, and signifying survival. I had visions and expectations of ringing that glorious bell surrounded by the loved ones who supported me unfailingly during the darkest hours of my life.
The viral outbreak of Covid-19 has even taken away even my small cancer joys. The meal train had to be shut down. I can’t commiserate with my friends or have their companionship during this grueling time. I am limited to just one guest at chemo, and hospitals across the country are even barring spouses or any visitors at all from accompanying chemo patients. It’s all meant to protect us. I get it, but I get choked up at the very idea of doing chemo alone. I can’t think of anything more depressing.
I’ll be alone when I ring the bell.
I have been forthcoming with my struggles with anxiety, those that have only deepened with cancer entering my story. During this season of my life I find myself with so many challenges which would ordinarily consume a person: mothering three kids, working full time, running a business, parenting an infant, and enduring lengthy cancer treatment. Any one of these or some in combination are triggering to some extent. Now, I’m doing it all without the support system I had come to rely on, physically and mentally.
I keep slugging back coffee and pushing onward. I suppose it’s just pure survival mode keeping me chugging along. The fear is so overwhelming that I can’t even begin to process it. I’ve already mourned my old life and experienced the exquisite rage of letting it slip into the past. The threat of death already found a host in my body, betraying me from within, why wouldn’t it also exist outside my home?
Cancer is isolating. Cancer during a pandemic is particularly isolating, even while sharing a common unwelcome new reality with the public at large. I’m young and I was healthy until the doctors started blasting me with chemo each week. I take excellent care of my body, eating right and exercising even when I have felt awful between chemo infusions. I should be the kind of person who doesn’t have to be terrified of this virus killing me. My peers generally don’t have to worry and my Facebook feed is full of ignorant comments about how this will “just be like a common cold” for young folks like myself. But healthy and young was old me, new me is immunocompromosed. I won’t be in this wretched state forever. It will take several months after cancer treatment is over for my immune system to rebound. I just happen to have the complete shit luck of being compromised at the exact moment in modern history where it is fatally risky to be so.
I call oncology frequently to inquire about whether my treatment plan will require any changes. For one, I am terrified that the surgery to remove my cancerous breast tissue will be cancelled as a result of overrun hospitals. It’s too early to know. My worry deepens. Will the overtaxed healthcare system be able to protect me from the pandemic lurking within their walls? They can’t even protect their own staff.
How safe is it to venture out to the hospital for chemotherapy when there are so many dangerous pandemic minimizers and deniers flooding social media and our national news? Will I die getting infusions for a treatable breast cancer because some asshat felt it was below his red-blooded-American right to live life as usual and crossed paths with my husband at the grocery store picking up formula for our baby that I can no longer feed from my cancerous breasts?
We are all mourning the loss of life as we knew it. I mourned my life before cancer and now I’m mourning my life as a cancer patient surrounded by love.
