Day One Blog
Why the Large Lady went to the Large Lost Coast
I remember the taste of iron, the saline flushing through my IV. I stared at the wall mural - a painting of the San Diego beaches. It was beautifully sunny, waves that were perfection embodied, and palm trees that seemed to stretch across miles of the beach. There was something so cruel about it, seeing any scenes of the outside world jailed by the walls of the hospital treatment room.
Another round, another day - the chemotherapy dragged on. It felt like I was here endlessly, confined by my diagnosis and the “life-saving” plan. Nausea was a constant state of mind. Thoughts were a fog, and when I tried to grasp them in my hands, they always slipped away. A mind I had trained for years, a mind pursuing a PhD in Neuroscience, stood no match to the IV of cisplatin.
A few weeks prior…
I got a call from my doctor - he sounded sheepish, unwilling to want to disclose details over the phone. My stomach sank, knowing immediately that my cancer had come back. I couldn’t cope. With just a few sentences, I could hear the tension of thoughtfully chosen words and the uneasiness over the phone from him.
Time between the phone call and my doctor’s visit stood still. A breath constantly held. My nerves and anxiety welled up, making my mind race through endless possibilities.
“We could be looking at a timeline of two years.”
I didn’t hear anything else - I blacked out the rest. Those words bounced across my brain creating reverberations and damage in every corner it touched. My good and bad memories, all tainted by the fact that my life could end.
That night, my boyfriend held me tightly and I melted into him. He helped me let go of that breath and to feel the full weight of my emotions. I wept until tears couldn’t be formed.
The next morning felt like a blur. I was angry, frustrated, heartbroken, depressed, and a source of purely negative energy. I remember mustering the courage to go to lab the next day, wanting more and more distractions to get me out of my head.
As I biked to work, a constant question rang through my mind…if I didn’t survive, what the fuck did I want to do with my time left?
It was such a humbling and brutal question to even think - it made me tear up, gasp in frustration, and make me want to scream at the top of my lungs, but it was a question I wanted to begin to find answers to.
I listened to this Duncan Trussel podcast, where he described his own battle with cancer. In the podcast, he mentioned that it felt like the world was a constant amusement park and that you were one small human that was in the middle. No one would care if you got on rides or not, you were just existing, and everyone and everything would continue with or without you. As morbid as that sounds, there was a comfort in knowing that this world would keep turning, life would move forward, and that there would still be all of these spectacular things, even if you weren’t there to see them.
But what did I care to see? How did I want to exist with the time I had? What amusement park did I want to be in the middle of?
I reflected on the time I had mushrooms - how much I was enamored by nature, biology, and the ocean. It brought me down the road of reserving permits for a four day backpacking trip to the Lost Coast Trail in Northern California.