My Time With Chemo
You have to understand how much I’d embraced the non-Western medicine lifestyle. (Well at least as much as I was able to on my limited budget.) For twelve years I’d gone to see regular doctors for annual check-ups and for very little in between. I’d managed to control my lifelong allergies by eating differently and taken Echinacea (and avoided sick people?) and gone years without getting a cold. From the time of the initial diagnosis each doctor we’d spoken to had said the same thing, “it doesn’t appear that you’ll need chemo.” It was the one thing I’d held onto as I read through the information I’d gathered about breast cancer. Surgery I could handle. I was even prepared as much as I could be to let them shoot radiation into my breast but everything in me resisted chemo. There was no way I could logically allow someone to pump poison into my veins.
I was a wreck when we got back from Tampa. I started doing research and was disturbed by what I was reading. I was like a lot of other women, though, and was most upset at the prospect of losing my hair. I’d been growing my dreadlocks for six years and was quite attached to them. Never mind the point that I’d grown several sets of locs over the years. It was the point that I was going to have to cut my hair or risk having strangers hand me handfuls of locs in the street.
We were set up with an oncologist in town and he recommended I get started as soon as possible. He was actually shocked that I’d been through all I’d been through without having met with an oncologist. I’d honestly just followed what I was the natural progression of things: remove the cancer and then do the rest. Now I realize how unusual it is that no one ever mentioned oncology in all of our appointments.
When we left the oncologist office I did so with one thought in mind: to cut my hair before the chemicals got the chance to make it fall out. It seemed fitting that I control the little bit I could.
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