HEY GRUMPY

What Steroids Made of Me

Cocktails with chemo

It was tricky.

Friends often asked if they could sit with me during chemo infusions. I appreciated their intentions, but I realized I needed to protect my friends from me.

Here’s what I mean.

I was given a cocktail of pre-meds before the chemo infusions would start. Mainly, they were anti-nausea meds, plus a big dose of steroids. After the first few infusions, I learned that the steroid made me less patient than usual, if not downright bitchy.

It didn’t happen all the time, and never with nurses or with one particular friend, Tanya, who was amazingly calm. She would sit with me and meditate, while I listened to music and wrote. I’d sometimes try to meditate with her, but I’d always fall asleep. We’d talk, too, quietly — at a relaxed and comforting pace.

Then there was my friend, Hollywood, a filmmaker, who often wanted to sit with me. It worked well once when she was exhausted and asked if she could lie down on the bed that happened to be in the infusion space. It was fine with me. I preferred to sit back in the lounge chair with my feet up. Hollywood was sweet and sleepy that day, and our energy levels matched.

Other days, Hollywood was her usual intense, fast-paced, and highly verbal self. That would normally have been great. We would spar and commiserate and make jokes. But when I was in the bitchy chemo mode, her constant talking drove me nuts. I kept wanting to quote the Hemingway line from his short story Hills Like White Elephants.

Would you please please, please, please please please, please stop talking.

Instead, I would say something like Hey ‘Wood, I feel like I’m gonna throw up. I need to nap. She took no offense, but she also stuck around, talking as fast and loud as a New York stock trader, chatting with one of her film students. At some point, when she asked to come to sit with me, I said that I was doing okay during infusions, and I preferred to use that time to write. I thanked her profusely for all her kind gestures of support.

The person who got the brunt of the steroids was my girlfriend, Beth. She knew better than to sit with me during infusions. She would take off once I got the steroids and return later to pick me up.

The steroids made me hyper-critical of Beth’s driving. Honestly, even her daughter, Aziza would say Beth was a terrible driver. It was a fact. She would stop at the last minute at lights, ride other cars’ bumpers and pump the gas so that the car often lurched.

I had learned to accept her driving quirks, and I was usually good at keeping my mouth shut. But with my steroid-heightened mind, I would call out, Stop. Jeez, Beth. Give that car some room.

You get the point.

After a few occurrences like that, Beth started saying Sounds like your steroids talking or Hey Grumpy. She would laugh, and then I would laugh at how ridiculous I was acting.

There was a threshold day during chemo when I couldn’t imagine a future — only an endless repetition of rogue cells infiltrating tissues and organs, along with the steady fading away of passion. That was a dark and clarifying time. My body was broken down to the point that it needed to restart again. I was hairless. I didn’t sweat. Just the idea of ever having sex again was exhausting. All my cherished beliefs seemed to be crumbling.

I worked through that shadowy place the way I worked through most breast cancer-related experiences. I listened to music and tried to write my way toward the direction of light.

***

“You looked like shit last week,” one of my coworkers said on a Monday morning, three months after chemo started. People tended not to tell me when my eyes were sunken, my face was blotchy, or my nose dripped blood on the mahogany boardroom table. Nor did I hide behind wigs or makeup.

Instead of avoiding the topic of cancer entirely — like I’d done after my first round of breast cancer and a mastectomy 9 years prior — I immersed myself in cancer culture. I read Audre Lorde’s journal and Susan Sontag’s book, Illness as Metaphor. I always wanted to argue with Sontag — whom herself had died from cancer. I kept that argument continually rolling through my mind and found it strangely motivating.

I looked at magazines and chat groups and blogs, and cancer websites. I quit fighting the word survivor, which had always seemed to tempt fate.

I corresponded with women who had been through similar stage-4 experiences. I gratefully accepted prayer shawls, bag balm, and green totem stones. Who knows what cures us?

I started listening to Max Richter’s version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over and over during chemo infusions. The rearrangement of that music seemed to symbolize an interior reinvention in the same way that flowing water reshapes stones. I also found comfort in an essay about surrender as part of the healing process.

It didn’t mean giving up.

Surrender meant accepting difficult truths to arrive at a broader perspective. The essayist also suggested that the reader be open to experiencing the sensation of a benevolent embrace.

That sense of being held could be understood as coming from God, Nature, or some other Higher Power.

I conceived of it as an awkward, sweaty hug from the older Marlon Brando — who seemed to keep showing up in my imagination as my cancer navigator.