Cancer, COVID-19, science and learning to trust

_{Photo courtesy of Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service}

I’ve been too busy writing lately so I haven’t had much time to write. Does that make sense?

Here’s the deal (as our fabulous new President would say – and what a blessing to be able to say that right?), I’ve been working on a novel. Like for the past two years and then some. Through all of 2019 and the ankle break that kept me stuck inside for nearly five months. Through all of 2020 and this pandemic, which has kept us all stuck inside and away from each other and life’s many wonderful distractions and is still, I’m sad to say, not over by a long shot.

And here’s the thing. I just finished it, the book. Title is #IMPATIENT. It’s a dark romp about cancer and other stuff. Like crime and friendship and the whole cancer industrial complex. It’s in the hands of a few trusted readers at the moment. As soon as they’ve found, and I’ve fixed, all the plot holes and bad science and insipid dialogue, it’ll be off to the agent. I hope.

And then I’ll need to figure out what to work on next — in the realm of fiction, anyway.

In the realm of nonfiction, there’s the all too real world of cancer and COVID-19, both of which I write about for my job-job at Fred Hutch. For the record, I didn’t come to science or the field of science writing intentionally. I was a writer, sure, but science wasn’t my subject. I sort of stumbled into it after being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. I wanted to learn more about how cancer operated, how it all worked, so I could do my part to take it down.

With all the incredible sciencing going on with COVID-19 (along with the conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy), I decided to write about my complicated relationship with science and how I learned to trust it with my life after being diagnosed with cancer. Because I’d never felt healthier in my life than when they told me I had stage 3 lobular. Here’s some of it:

When somebody in a white coat tells you something you don’t want to hear, it’s easy to decide they’re full of beans — especially when nothing seems amiss.

I’d never felt healthier in my life than the day I was diagnosed with cancer (10 years ago this month). I had no fatigue, no lingering cough, no unexplained weight loss, not even a dang lump. All I had was a tiny tuck on one breast. But the doctors said they both had to go. They said I was stage 3 and needed chemo and radiation and then would have to take hormone-squelching drugs for the next 10 years.

Getting that news was like having a piano fall out of the sky and land on my head. You may recognize the feeling from last March when a concert grand called SARS-CoV-2 landed on all of ours. Part of me desperately wanted to ignore the surgeon, the scans, the histopathology, those microscopic images of my suffering tissue. That part wanted to run off to Mexico and bury my feet — and my head — in the sand.

Instead, I talked to friends and family and to other women who’d been down this road. Then I took a deep breath and trusted the science, even though I only understood a fraction of it. And I soon discovered cancer treatment was much less awful than I’d anticipated. Top-notch anti-emetics meant zero nausea; problematic low white cell counts were boosted with a belly shot of Neulasta (and no, not the kind you did in college). My regular jogs, which I thought of as therapy, actually were, according to the epidemiological studies I was now reading on the reg.

I was swayed. Science was something I needed to stay alive. 

FULL LINK: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2021/02/learning-to-trust-science-with-your-life.html

Here’s the whole essay Learning to Trust Science with Your Life published a few weeks ago. Feel free to take a read. As always, take care and thanks for stopping by. I imagine I’ll have much more to share in days to come. 😉