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Boxing, blogging and trying to ignore the breast cancer beast

30 Oct

Photo courtesy of Jim Seida / NBCNews.com

Yes, I know it’s been a while since I posted anything. I’ve had a busy summer — hiking, baking, boxing and most of all doing this thing I like to call “pretending I never had cancer.”

But summer’s over and fall is here and with it, October, the month when it’s pretty much impossible to forget your breast cancer because everywhere you look people are dressed like gigantic pink ribbons and/or talking about their battle with the beast. And I suppose I’m no different.

I wrote a series of essays last October about my BC diagnosis, my double mastectomy and what it was like to go “out there” and date while going through breast cancer treatment, to try to find love in the time of chemotherapy.

My latest essay, published today on nbcnews.com/TODAY.com, takes up where those other essays left off, delving into some of the ripples you experience after diagnosis and treatment, as you try to navigate that weird territory known as survivorship.  Here’s a snippet:

There’s nothing like having cancer to make you appreciate the little things in life — like buying shampoo, running a few miles or being able to forget the address of the hospital where you were treated.

After I was diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2011, I felt like I lived at that hospital. Today — a year out from treatment — it’s in the rear view mirror, along with the double mastectomy and debilitating chemo and radiation I wrote about last October on TODAY.com.

Not that there aren’t still plenty of daily reminders regarding my year of living cancerously: chemo brain, adhesion pain, hot flashes (courtesy of my new BFF tamoxifen) and, oh yes, my board-flat Olive Oyl chest.

But there have been good, uh, developments, too.

The biggest one — for me — is that I now have hair. For those of you who think baseball is slow and tedious, all I can say is try watching hair grow sometime.

I disguised my bald head with a wig from mid-June until New Year’s Eve then gratefully ditched it, along with the tape, the itchiness, and the constant fear that I’d accidentally spin the thing around backwards while swing dancing like some character on Gilligan’s Island.

Come January, I let my freak flag fly and began rocking a dark gray micro pixie.

“With the wig, I was trying to pass as a healthy, normal woman,” I joked to my friends about my super short ‘do. “Now, I’m trying to pass as French.”

You can read the full essay — and check out more pics of me boxing! — here.  As always, thanks for stopping by. And please feel free to share your story — or favorite survival tip. We’re in this together, people.

Kicking cancer’s sorry ass

10 Jun

I “celebrated” my one year chemoversary this week. Last year, on June 6, I was sitting in a blue Barcalounger up at Cancertown for the very first time, waiting for the nurses to flood my body with a deluge of drugs: some poisonous, some designed to help me withstand the poison.

Celebrate, of course, isn’t quite the right word. Who celebrates the onset of excrutiating bone pain, nausea, fatigue and hair loss? 

I am thrilled, of course, to be a year away from all of the pain and the powerlessness of last year’s chemotherapy. Although to be honest, I’m sort of going through it again now (sans the hair stuff) thanks to my latest obsession: boxing.

I’m not sure where my fascination with boxing came from. I used to work out at a gym where they had a speed bag tucked away in a far corner and I would play with it in between lifting weights and doing cardio, finally figuring out how to pummel the thing without having it pummel me back. It was therapeutic to pound away at all the stressors in my life — a cranky boss, a misogynistic coworker, a bad boyfriend.

After I quit the gym, I missed pounding away at the bag. So much so, that two decades later (at the age of 51 and a weight of about 190 pounds), I took a couple of boxing fitness classes at a Seattle institution known as Cappy’s. The class nearly killed me — I practically had to use the wheelchair lift to get on and off the bus afterwards — but I loved it. Unfortunately, my Achilles tendons didn’t. The jumprope warm-up exacerbated an old injury so I had to put my gloves on the shelf.

I didn’t shelve the exercise, though. I started walking and then running and then tap dancing and swing dancing. I also began watching what I put in my mouth and, to be honest, put a lot less in my mouth (I even managed to kick a lifelong friend — starchy carbs — to the curb). Within six months, I’d dropped 50 pounds and was feeling a lot better about myself and my body. At least, I was until I found a weird little tuck on one of my breasts.

Cancer had dealt me a firm left hook. And a right hook, as well, as it turned out. I had tumors in both my girls. But I made it through the surgery, the chemo, the radiation, and the recovery and now I’m hitting my one-year cancerversaries fast and furious.

You might even say, I’m knocking them out one at a time, thanks to the punches and combinations I’m learning in my new boxing class at Belltown’s Axtion Club.

That’s where I celebrated my chemoversary on Wednesday. And yesterday, I went back for my sixth session, an amazing feat considering that — just as before — the very first class nearly did me in. Each hour starts with an intense warm-up that begins with jumprope (my Achilles tendons have healed, apparently) and then folds in a slew of other exercises. There are footwork routines, medicine ball drills, punches and my personal favorite — one-handed push-ups. (The first time the trainer — a gorgeous South American demigod of a man — demonstrated these puppies, I nearly did a spit-take. Who does that?)

Thanks to the double mastectomy, the chemo, the radiation, and the fact I haven’t done a lick of upper body work for more than a year, I’m not even close to doing a one-handed push-up or these other ones that involve twisting one leg into some ungodly froglike position. I’m barely able to do two-handed push-ups. Girly style. But I give them my all. Ditto for the rest of the warm-up and the sparring that comes later. And so far, I haven’t embarrassed myself too much. Or at least I haven’t thrown up in class (according to the trainer, it’s happened).

But it ain’t easy. Nor pretty. Not knowing what I was in for, I wore makeup to my first class and by the end of the hour, my eyes were burning from a steady, sweaty stream of foundation and mascara and eyebrow powder (chemo took my brows so if I want ’em, I have to paint ’em on). These days, I go to class with only a hint of lipstick and not much else (yes, people, I am clothed). I even wear a headband, Olivia Newton-John style, because I’m such a Sweaty Betty, either due to the incredible workout my out-of-shape body is getting or the tamoxifen I take every day (it doesn’t give me hot flashes, but I’m definitely feeling the occasional hot flush). 

At the end of the hour, my head and body are sopping wet, my face is flushed and puffy and I look like a small, sweaty version of Billy Crystal, thanks to the out-of-control chemo curls. But I don’t care. Despite my long standing position as a girly girl, despite my overwhelming urge to “pass” (and trust me, the missing eyebrows are a dead giveaway), I’ve decided I’m not there to look pretty. Or normal. Or nice. I’m there to learn how to box. I’m there to get strong. I’m there to do whatever I can do to kick cancer’s sorry ass.

Am I crazy for pursuing a sport that makes me feel as nauseous, as fatigued, as overwhelmed by pain as the chemo I went through last summer? Maybe. It does feel strikingly similar to the infusion aftermath we all know so well, particularly a chemo session capped by one of those nice juicy Neulasta shots. You know, the ones that give you instant arthritis in your hands and feet.

The day after each boxing class, my hands ache from the punches I’ve given (and received). My arms can barely lift the blow dryer to dry my hair (ah, but what a miracle it is to have hair). It even hurts to pull my pants up after I pee. I’m beaten down, I’m bruised, I’m once again grabbing the furniture to hobble around my house. But then I take a few Ibuprofen and drape my body in ice packs and soak in a hot, hot bath filled with Epsom salt.

And then I get back up and do it again a couple of days later. Just as I did with the chemo. Just as we all do. Except this time, I’m going through the pain by choice. And this time, it’s not making me weaker, it’s making me stronger. This time, I’m transforming my body on my terms — through strength and endurance and sheer will as opposed to a surgeon’s scalpel. And this time, I can stop whenever I want. It’s just that I don’t want to stop — not yet anyway.

Not until I can get my scarred and poisoned and radiation-ravaged body to squeak out at least one of those wacky one-handed push-ups. Not until I can pound out a bit more of my grief and frustration and fear and, yes, pure unadulterated rage at being sucker punched by cancer.