Hot Flash. Cold sweat. Change at thirty-five
A scorching hot reminder
that I am still alive
Changes, changes, changes are happening to me
I wonder what it’s all about
I wonder why me
The
ovary snatchers had thrust me into Meno Meno Land. No survival kit accompanied my crash landing
at the base of the Mount Hysteria, and I wandered desperately through a
scorching hot valley. The volcano
rumbled incessantly as I dodged lava streams and tried to deflect the molten
rocks falling all about me.
I felt alone in the inferno. Sharing stories about cancer was easy. A twenty-something Alaskan woman in her first
year of marriage, battling for her life, is a jaw-dropper in any crowd, but
discussing menopause with friends who were still young and vibrant left me
cold.
I could no longer concentrate on their
chatter, I was too busy waving down the waitress who’d been remiss in refilling
my glass of ice water—the cool condensation-clad container that doubled as a freeze
pop to roll on my neck. My relaxed friends didn’t seem to notice. As they were chilling
out, I was melting into menopausal mush. They had time to ease into “The
Change” to prepare, to change
eating habits, to exercise. They were on
a gradual descent into the heat, while I’d been plunged into the inferno. I’d crash-landed in six hours flat.
Other than cancer, my
ovaries had never given me any grief. It
is only the absence of them that had me yearning for the keys to the body parts
room where I imagined them floating like buoyant eggs in a canning jar. I longed
for them—especially at night—when a warm tingling in my cheeks rapidly moved to
my neck and I found myself in hell dodging fireballs. Impaled on a rotisserie rolling round and
round in my bed, my once cool sheets threatened to suffocate me until a gust
from the ever-present fan hit condensation beads on my skin and plunged me into
an arctic freeze.
My outfits consisted of
loose sweat pants, a tank top, and a polar fleece jacket. My beverage of choice
rotated between ice-cold water and jitter-laced coffee. All thoughts of social interaction were
peppered with panic; was there a chilly escape route?
It was hard to remember a
life beyond cancers borders, where once upon a time I was a normal girl whose
fairytale enemies bore benign sticks and stones. But my fairytale ending had
been rewritten.
The twenty-three year old
baldheaded woman turned her blazing blue eyes to face the malevolent cancer
dragon. She consumed mystical potions
concocted to shrivel the creature, and her two children—born in defiance of the
monster—forced it to recoil back into its lair.
Several years later, her
ovaries were wrenched from the malignant clutches of the cancerous beast, but
as she smote the dragon it exacted vengeance, huffing and puffing its final
death flame—a scorching menopausal heat—licking the back of her neck for
eternity.
My
doctor eventually pulled the patch and prescribed a little green pill
consisting of conjugated equine estrogens called Premarin—Pregnant Mare
Urine. I wondered if things could get
any worse. I’d lost my reproductive organs and replaced them with horse pee to
trick my brain into thinking I was still vital.
This is an excerpt from my book, Chemo on the Rocks: My Great Alaskan Misadventure. For more information about Chemo on the Rocks, click here.
