Live Strong

When first diagnosed with leukemia after a blood test, my doctor recommended I should read Lance Armstrong’s biography, which seemed harmless enough at the time. I politely nodded and said I’d look into it, but I had no intention of doing so. I’m not too into reading biographies, and I generally avoid anything which appears to be uplifting or inspiring in an obvious way.

When I was in the hospital at OHSU for six weeks undergoing chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, I had a strange reaction to compazine, an anti nausea medication. Instead of helping me keep my meals down, it gave me tremendous anxiety. I took it in pill form for about a week, by the end of which I was a nervous wreck. I didn’t think a medication was the culprit, as being confined to a windowless room in the bowels of a hospital and taking “medicine” to kill off my immune system would seem to be enough to give anyone fits. During this spell, I woke up in the middle of the night once and had no idea where I was. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, and had convinced myself I had been in a car accident. I told the nurse about my declining mental state, and she arranged for a doctor who had an interest in helping young adult cancer patients cope to see me. After we met, he gave me a thick, black and yellow binder with the phrase “livestrong” emblazoned across the cover. It didn’t help. It took a direct IV injection of compazine followed by an almost paralytic anxiety attack for the nurses to make the connection. The stay became more tolerable after that.

I eventually was released from the hospital, but still had to go to OHSU nearly every day for careful examination of my blood counts. Some days I had to sit in the transfusion room near the back of the section of the hospital designated “hematological oncology” (which is just fancy talk for blood cancers) for hours. The transfusion room has around thirty reclining chairs, where people with various diseases sit and receive whatever medications or fluids they need intravenously. On any given day there are some seriously sick people there, most of them elderly. You can tell how far along the people are. Some look like any person you might see on the street, others are bald and swollen yet still cheerful and outgoing. Some look like they’re just on this side of dying. I’m fairly certain I fell into each of those categories at one time or another. On the wall where the windows look out across the city, next to the televisions showing some terrible daytime talk show, is a large autographed poster of Lance Armstrong, arms held high as he crosses the finish line on his bicycle. It really pissed me off. For one thing, he raised the bar for cancer survivors. Just getting through it isn’t enough anymore. You have to win the Tour de France afterwards. It was just about the last thing I wanted to see in that moment.

Armstrong is probably an alright guy with good intentions, and it’s not really him that bothers me. Somewhere in that image of him “beating cancer” and regaining his former glory is a rather dark implication. Not long after I was diagnosed, a nurse told me how important is was to be a fighter, which I’ve heard before in regards to illness. It didn’t bother me at the time, but now I can’t help but think what utter bullshit it really is. I never fought anything. I experienced it. It overwhelmed me and consumed my life. I might as well have tried to fight a hurricane. If someone is able to “fight” and “beat” cancer, then a person who dies must be weak or flawed. What generally amounts to a genetic crapshoot becomes the fault of the person for not fighting hard enough.

When I’d sit down across from that giant poster for hours, waiting for the IV drip to finish, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Fuck Lance Armstrong.”

(Side note: this isn’t from a daily observation, but from my experience with illness. I know I’m dipping into that well quite a bit, but what can I say, I’ve got some shit to work out.)