The Hunger Games

The time between my last appointment (the behavioral health referral mentioned in the last post) and today was marked by various degrees of normalcy, and with it, some renewed mental energy.

I was starting to endure a significant amount of stress, at least internally. Stress is really bad for you if you have cancer. Not only is there some research that suggests that stress produces hormones that aid tumor growth, but in me it manifests itself as a lack of appetite; this is a problem. For about a month now I’ve been trying to “bulk up” in anticipation of significant weight loss as my body responds to radiation and chemo.

Bulking up with fat is a massive chore for me. I’ve been walking around at the same weight for at least 15 years, and I have a high metabolism that drives that homeostasis. I’m very active: I routinely lift weights, I play hockey a couple times a week, sometimes more, and in the summer and fall I spend much of my child-free time in the backcountry scouting or hunting. Three weeks into this attempt to eat …and eat… I’d plateaued at 15 pounds gained. I’d ceased all unneeded physical activity, began eating calorie dense foods, shakes, eating between eating, and anything else that made sense.

15 pounds is all I could manage in becoming the most unhealthy version of myself. Frustration of this lack of weight gain was adding to my stress levels, which kicked off the negative feedback loop mentioned above. I was stressed because I wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t hungry because I was stressed. To add to the stress from me trying to play Hungry Hungry Hippo-man, my neck tumor started to get weird.

My brand of cancer started in my throat, at the base of my tongue, and spread to the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck as previously established in this blog, but my neck was really starting to get uncomfortably large by mid-February.  As more fluid and necrotic tissue built up, it began exerting pressure on my ear, jaw, and every other structure around it. This was both uncomfortable and alarming as the time ticked away between biopsy and treatment.

Then, for no specific reason I can identify, my neck lump began to rapidly deflate. It was almost perceptible: I was sitting in my new easy chair and noticed it start to feel. This is significant because other than pressure, it doesn’t have a sensation of any kind, so all sorts of thoughts began to race through my head. “Oh god, is it spreading somewhere else? Is that how it works?” Fortunately, I’m mildly retarded and this was just the ignorance speaking, as what is more likely (according to the internet, my ENT nurse never called me back when I left a message about it, so I assume it wasn’t life threatening) is that my body was flushing out the necrotic cells and fluid. However, because I didn’t know this at the time, I took it as a harbinger of my imminent doom. Enter more stress.

While I’m talking about being in tune with your body, let me just take a moment to give a shout out to women writ large: In my experience, women are always “listening to their body” and trying to apply self care for every little odd physical sensation, to include communicating it externally. This is not a common phenomenon for most men. We ignore our bodies entirely, accept pain and physical sensation as “welp, this is my life now” or “I guess I’m dying now, better clear the browser history lol.” Having a malignant tumor makes you, as I’ve heard Rena say, “a hostage in your own body” and not only are you hyper aware of your body, but every single little sensation triggers the, “oh God, this is the end, isn’t it?” I have no idea how women live like this. Ignorance is bliss.

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Be Hard to Kill

I had a great weekend with the kids, all things considered, and we went to a local park on Puget Sound that’s known to host marine mammals at certain points of the year. I’ve heard that Puget Sound is experiencing an unsustainable boom in Harbor Seals at the moment, which is devastating the local salmon population and drawing in more Orca pods. Despite the ecological strife, they are kind of funny to watch, and we did for a time after a long walk along the coast to get to where they were hanging out.

This was the longest sustained amount of physical activity since my last skate on 10 February, and my body let me know it. Fortunately my son, who generally likes to be carried on my shoulders, was fine on his own most of the time so it wasn’t unnecessarily taxing, but between some kind of bad allergy attack I was having and the walk itself down the beach I was totally exhausted. I had to get them back home so I could relax and recover.

I was probably around my lowest point, mentally, of this interregnum between the flurry of initial activity, and the beginning of my treatment. Sunday evenings are usually tough days for me. I get to come back to an empty home, sometimes with toys still strewn about, and pick up the pieces of my weekend life. I wasn’t eating like I should have been, I was sleep deprived, stressed, and just not in an ideal place mentally. I needed to make a course correction fast.

Monday I decided to put on my uniform and go into the office to try and feel some sense of normalcy, and it might have been the very thing that gave me some sense of renewed purpose.  At some point in the day I remember sitting in my car and just saying to myself, “be hard to kill.”  It was some saying I saw once on a moto-tshirt God knows where and who knows how long ago. The idea behind the saying is that you make yourself as strong and as capable as possible so that you become too difficult to attack. For whatever reason that morning, I decided that saying also applied to my current situation. I had to become hard to kill. 

Just like that my appetite came back, I began checking off a bunch of things on my “to do” list I’d been putting off, and even got some minor tasks done at work. I even started to do something I’d been outsourcing to Addison previously, which was browsing Reddit for answers, and I started learning more about those like me- those who had had this condition, this treatment plan, and were in the middle of it or had survived it. It’s honestly something I should have taken responsibility for sooner, but I’m too stubborn for my own good sometimes.

This culminated in me (metaphorically) grabbing my nuts and going into dental to get a consultation with a dentist about my upcoming radiation and procuring the prescription dental items I will be using for the rest of my life. I walked in and was politely persistent that I needed to have a consultation with any dentist that had white space on the books. Fortunately they drummed up a guy that had some experience with oncology patients and he not only hooked me up with the prescriptions I needed, but talked me through what to look out for during and after treatment from a dental perspective. He was altogether much more competent than the guy I got my pre-radiation exam from and I felt like my preparations, medically, were just about complete.

Now if the proton therapy clinic would just call me to tell me what time I’m supposed to show up on the 17th…

The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.