Want to lose 8 kilos in 3 weeks? Introducing the all-new Chemo Diet!
Step 1: Eating Plan
Pump yourself full of cytotoxic drugs once a week. This should reduce your appetite, enabling you to follow this simple, streamlined eating plan.
Breakfast: 1 Weetbix with milk. Eat half and throw the rest away. 1 glass of juice with medication.
Lunch: 1 piece of toast. If you’re feeling dehydrated because the drugs make water taste repulsive, try masking it with cordial.
Dinner: Make a pitiful face until someone in your family agrees to make you a salad. If you have developed a sudden intolerance to food with flavour, salad can be substituted with a small bowl of unsalted mashed potato.
Step 2: Exercise
The fatigue from the chemo drugs should prevent you from doing anything resembling exercise. This will cause your muscles to degenerate, resulting in extra weight loss. You can boost your anti-exercise potential by filling up your chest cavity with fluid. This will prevent your lungs from working, limiting your range of movement to within 10 metres of the bed/couch.
Step 3: Extra Tips
If you’re really dedicated to the Chemo Diet, you can further reduce your food intake by mixing your chemotherapy drugs with blood thinners. This will result in severe nosebleeds, physically preventing you from eating for hours at a time. Even if you manage to get the food in your mouth, developing a weird psychological tic that makes you vomit whenever you get stressed will reduce the amount of kilojoules you absorb.
By following this revolutionary diet, you can be on your way to looking sickly thin today!
Coming up next...
The next entry will really be coming to you live from hospital - it’s time for more lung surgery. While the thought of being intubated and spending more time in hospital makes me want to reflex vomit, the thought of continuing to get needles in my chest every week to drain the fluid out is slightly more distressing. Plus my surgeon is awesome and rides a motorbike, so I’m going to do what he tells me.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Down the Rabbithole: Kea's Adventures in Chemoland Begin
Yes, I did just see Alice in Wonderland and I liked it. I’m not sure why the reviews have all been so bad. It’s possible that I was distracted from flaws in the plot/script by all of the shiny colours/Alice’s pretty clothes/Johnny Depp’s frequently changing accent, but I was entertained.
So, I’m coming to you live from Westmead Cancer Care Centre. Well, it’s not actually live to tell you the truth, because the CCC is located in the bowels of the hospital, somewhere between the incinerator and the dungeon, so there’s no internet access down here. But I did bring my laptop in so I can type this up and post it later. Okay, that’s also a lie. I was too lazy to drag my laptop in here when it wasn’t to watch Twilight (more about this obvious lapse in good judgement/taste in a later post) or How I Met Your Mother DVDs. So today I’m doing things the old school way and scribbling in a notebook propped up on my makeshift pillow-desk. I have recently become aware that in the wider world, pillows are being used for many functions unrelated to sleeping, such as stylish headwear, creepy celebrity obsessions or even life partnership. Increased interest in pillows is a possible side-effect of the extra time spent in bed due to surgery/chemo. I should research this. Or better yet, convince one of my friends already in the medical field to go back to uni and do it as a Phd thesis. Guaranteed Nobel prize right there.
As you can see from the above, chemo has already started turning my brain mushy.
The past week in Chemoland has had more than its usual ups and downs. The extra bumps don’t really help with the nausea. I guess I’m a bit more aware of things with this first cycle as well because I’m comparing all of the similarities and differences between this lot of chemo and the last one. Some of the differences are good e.g. not having to spend as much time in the CCC, not having a chemo pump attached to me for two weeks at a time, and the fact that these chemo side-effects feel more like what I imagine a hangover would be like and less like being drowned in a vat of poison.
Despite being told by several medical professionals that things would be better this time around, and spending weeks repeating this assertion to myself and everyone around me, when the morning of my first dose came, I got so anxious about starting the whole process again that I threw up in my grandma’s car about ten minutes into the drive to Sydney (apparently now I’m an anxious vomiter, so that’s new). Unfortunately she didn’t have any plastic bags in the car, so I had to tip her bag of lollies out into the glovebox so I could throw up into it. I promptly realised that the bag was leaking and had to stuff it with tissues until we reached the rest area where I attempted to clean myself up in a blue-lit unisex toilet that reeked of urine and trucker sweat. Omi, my awesome grandma, decided that a better option was to stop off at the shops and buy me a new T-shirt. She’s a smart lady.
Once we finally made it here things went very uneventfully. I didn’t feel too bad the day after the treatment. Clearly this was chemo’s sneaky plan to lull me into a false sense of security because the second day hit a bit harder, preventing me from consuming anything that wasn’t juice or mashed potatoes. But still, things weren’t going too badly until I woke up on Saturday morning and realised that I couldn’t walk from my bedroom to the kitchen without sounding like I was having an asthma attack, so I had to go to the hospital and have another three litres of fluid drained out of my chest so I could breathe again. Hospitals are slow places at the best of times, but because it was Saturday, this process took about 30 hours, so that was how I spent my weekend. It’s my own fault really, because I’d planned to meet some friends for dinner and whenever I make such plans I end up hospitalised. Last year when I tried to go to my friend Nat’s housewarming and to the Mexican film festival with Gab, I missed both events because I got trapped in Wyong Hospital with a blood clot. This time I’ve learned my lesson: I am clearly not supposed to have a social life, but should confine myself to my house, keep myself company with hundreds of cats and venture forth only for doctors’ appointments and to hurl my cats at passing schoolchildren.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Story So Far...
I’m Kea and I’m a 24-year-old with Stage IV signet cell cancer (I’d never heard of it either. It’s not one of the cool cancers that get coloured ribbons and head-shaving charity days. That’s why sometimes I like to tell people that I have a more interesting cancer, like ovarian cancer. I’m allowed to lie about it because I have cancer). I also enjoy old movies and Thai food.
The idea for this blog came about shortly after I started my first round of chemotherapy and had gone out for some Indian food to celebrate the cessation of my nausea. My friend Julia (amazing lady who I once pledged to marry – I may still follow through on that), who I suspect may have been slightly tipsy, suggested that I write a book about my experiences as a young cancer sufferer.
(Note: I may have made Jules sound like a homeboy for dramatic effect. She is not a homeboy.)
The next day I wrote a fairly boring opening paragraph then promptly gave up on it. I kept meaning to come back to it, but then I finished my treatment and figured my life would be normal and not worth documenting anymore. Now that cancer has decided to feast on my innards once more, I’ve resurrected the idea in blog form, because it’s easier to manage for a non-writer like myself and also I’m curious to see whether anyone I don’t know will read it. Do people really just go online thinking “Hmm, I’d really like to hear what’s going on inside a complete stranger’s head instead of messing around on Facebook or looking at porn”? Oh, and hopefully this way when something new happens in the cancer saga, I won't have to repeat the story as many times because some people might have read it here.
Before I lay bare the minutiae of life with cancer, I should give a brief summary of the story so far.
1985 – 1997
Happy but uninteresting childhood, unless you count the fact that I was raised in a Mormon family and my father had several wives. Okay, I’m making the extra wives part up in the hopes that the sensationalism will get me a publishing deal which will lead into the production of a tear-jerking film starring a B-grade celebrity who is 43% more attractive than me (casting suggestions welcome).
1998 – 2003
Awkward teenage phase. Being Mormon, there was none of the usual sex, drugs or alcohol, so I expressed my teenage rebelliousness by going on exchange to Malaysia for a year and eating all the roti canai and nasi goreng I could handle.
2003 – 2008
Struggled through a 5-year degree without Centrelink support, instead relying on pizza delivery and checkout-chicking to finance my existence, hence accruing a massive credit card debt. I did not see this as an obstacle to spending a year studying in Chile, or traipsing around the world with my 16-year-old sister in tow, or briefly running away to Mexico with my boyfriend.
2009: Year of the Epic Fail
Began year full of still-somewhat-youthful optimism, intent on forging my career as a primary school teacher, influencing impressionable young minds in the public school system, moving out of my parents’ house and smashing all my credit cards with a sledgehammer. Instead discovered I had a giant tumour on my left ovary. Had crazily invasive surgery during which the doctors discovered the tumour was malignant and that there were cancer cells on the right one as well so he yanked both of them out. They weren’t sure exactly where the cancer had originated so just to be safe, they started some heavy chemotherapy that turned me into a hairless zombie for around 4 months. I spent a few weeks thinking all the bad stuff was over, before being hospitalised with a blood clot in my arm (That’s right, arm. Who gets a blood clot in their arm? It doesn’t even make sense. Unless you’re me). A few weeks later, my boyfriend, who was on holiday in Mexico, broke up with me over Facebook. The reasons he gave were all serious and emotional, but the paranoid self-loathing part of my brain was convinced that he just wanted not to feel guilty when he hooked up with a Mexican girl who drank tequila and wasn’t bald. My already fragile self-confidence disintegrated and I was convinced that the break-up was worse than having cancer.
2010: Everyone told me this year would be better than last year. Everyone lied.
After about a month of feeling sorry for myself, I tried to start putting my self-pitying pieces back together, enrolling in uni, taking my CV to every school within a one-hour radius and putting together awesome lesson plans. Work started trickling in and I was feeling okay, until my chest filled up with fluid which started crushing my lungs. When they did the surgery to drain it out, they found some cancer cells that managed to survive the previous chemo blitz.
So now it’s time for Kea Does Chemo: the Sequel. Opening at selected theatres, March 17th.
P.S. If you don’t know what reggaeton is then your life is severely lacking in both joy and awesomeness. Google it please. You have to do what I ask you to. I have cancer!
The idea for this blog came about shortly after I started my first round of chemotherapy and had gone out for some Indian food to celebrate the cessation of my nausea. My friend Julia (amazing lady who I once pledged to marry – I may still follow through on that), who I suspect may have been slightly tipsy, suggested that I write a book about my experiences as a young cancer sufferer.
Kea: I suppose it would give me something to do while I’m trapped in my house
under the influence of chemo...
Julia: Yeah bro, your story is really interesting.
Kea: But I’m not a very good writer.
Julia: That’s okay, I’ll fix it with my mad editing skillz and then it’ll get published and we’ll be rich!
(Note: I may have made Jules sound like a homeboy for dramatic effect. She is not a homeboy.)
The next day I wrote a fairly boring opening paragraph then promptly gave up on it. I kept meaning to come back to it, but then I finished my treatment and figured my life would be normal and not worth documenting anymore. Now that cancer has decided to feast on my innards once more, I’ve resurrected the idea in blog form, because it’s easier to manage for a non-writer like myself and also I’m curious to see whether anyone I don’t know will read it. Do people really just go online thinking “Hmm, I’d really like to hear what’s going on inside a complete stranger’s head instead of messing around on Facebook or looking at porn”? Oh, and hopefully this way when something new happens in the cancer saga, I won't have to repeat the story as many times because some people might have read it here.
Before I lay bare the minutiae of life with cancer, I should give a brief summary of the story so far.
1985 – 1997
Happy but uninteresting childhood, unless you count the fact that I was raised in a Mormon family and my father had several wives. Okay, I’m making the extra wives part up in the hopes that the sensationalism will get me a publishing deal which will lead into the production of a tear-jerking film starring a B-grade celebrity who is 43% more attractive than me (casting suggestions welcome).
1998 – 2003
Awkward teenage phase. Being Mormon, there was none of the usual sex, drugs or alcohol, so I expressed my teenage rebelliousness by going on exchange to Malaysia for a year and eating all the roti canai and nasi goreng I could handle.
2003 – 2008
Struggled through a 5-year degree without Centrelink support, instead relying on pizza delivery and checkout-chicking to finance my existence, hence accruing a massive credit card debt. I did not see this as an obstacle to spending a year studying in Chile, or traipsing around the world with my 16-year-old sister in tow, or briefly running away to Mexico with my boyfriend.
2009: Year of the Epic Fail
Began year full of still-somewhat-youthful optimism, intent on forging my career as a primary school teacher, influencing impressionable young minds in the public school system, moving out of my parents’ house and smashing all my credit cards with a sledgehammer. Instead discovered I had a giant tumour on my left ovary. Had crazily invasive surgery during which the doctors discovered the tumour was malignant and that there were cancer cells on the right one as well so he yanked both of them out. They weren’t sure exactly where the cancer had originated so just to be safe, they started some heavy chemotherapy that turned me into a hairless zombie for around 4 months. I spent a few weeks thinking all the bad stuff was over, before being hospitalised with a blood clot in my arm (That’s right, arm. Who gets a blood clot in their arm? It doesn’t even make sense. Unless you’re me). A few weeks later, my boyfriend, who was on holiday in Mexico, broke up with me over Facebook. The reasons he gave were all serious and emotional, but the paranoid self-loathing part of my brain was convinced that he just wanted not to feel guilty when he hooked up with a Mexican girl who drank tequila and wasn’t bald. My already fragile self-confidence disintegrated and I was convinced that the break-up was worse than having cancer.
2010: Everyone told me this year would be better than last year. Everyone lied.
After about a month of feeling sorry for myself, I tried to start putting my self-pitying pieces back together, enrolling in uni, taking my CV to every school within a one-hour radius and putting together awesome lesson plans. Work started trickling in and I was feeling okay, until my chest filled up with fluid which started crushing my lungs. When they did the surgery to drain it out, they found some cancer cells that managed to survive the previous chemo blitz.
So now it’s time for Kea Does Chemo: the Sequel. Opening at selected theatres, March 17th.
P.S. If you don’t know what reggaeton is then your life is severely lacking in both joy and awesomeness. Google it please. You have to do what I ask you to. I have cancer!
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