Back in December 2015, I was in Panama for what should have been 3 weeks working with Give and Surf. I arrived the week before Christmas, settled into the volunteer house in the secluded part of Isla Bastimentos in Bocas Del Toro. Tropical weather, Caribbean beaches, good waves plus the opportunity to help teach the young children of the Ngobe community as I’d been looking forward to — it was to be perfection. I’d done some volunteering while surfing & traveling in the past. I knew what to expect.

Unfortunately, a couple of days before Christmas, I came down with the flu. At that point, I was alone in the volunteer house as all the others had moved to the less secluded island/main town to celebrate the holidays. For a couple of days, I didn’t have access to medical care, or medicines (unless I managed to catch a water taxi to town), not much in the way of food, no cell service. To top it off, I couldn’t even go surf! It was miserable. Eventually, with my scant strength, I crawl-shuffled my way to the town, got some honey, lemon, analgesics and a hotel room with a phone. Christmas Eve I shivered into my sleeping bag/blanket while watching “Mi Villano Favorito” aka “Despicable Me” (hearing the Minions dubbed in Spanish was like a fevered trip). By Christmas morning my fever broke. A couple of hours later, I donned my bikini, grabbed my surfboard and hailed a water taxi to one of the best surf spots in Bocas. As you do. I was so excited that I wasn’t as sick as I had just been I quickly pivoted to what I would be doing had I not been sick at all… and promptly vomited in the water. (Sorry, this is a cancer blog, vomit and vomit-adjacent terminology are used freely.) I boomeranged to flu-sick so fast I couldn’t even haul my body back up to the boat I hailed to take me back to town.

I didn’t quite recover fully in the week or so that followed. I did manage to do a bit more of my volunteering, but I didn’t get to to back in the water much after that and I ended up leaving the island and Panama several days early. I’d say that’s a lesson learned, but that doesn’t quite work like that. When I’ve been sick, as soon as I feel any measure of well at all, I’d spring to life as if I managed to heal in hours. Our bodies don’t really like that, actually. Sure there are times, we have to rally and get going before we know we’re ready. But if, left to its own devices, I’d like to think our bodies have better sense than our will to be anything but sick. Now, I am about as hypochondriacal as they come, but I also sometimes lack the better sense to allow myself to properly convalesce. Like, if I just went for a run, maybe my ankle will heal better… Or if I took NSAIDs my chronic back pain will back off long enough so I can surf — and what consequence?…Or if same back pain isn’t so bad while I’m doing Insanity workout, then I should do the Insanity workout everyday, right (never mind that it hurts like hell before and worse yet after). By the way, MRIs I’d undergone throughout my cancer diagnosis did find that degenerative disease in that darned spine (“spinal canal stenosis and severe bilateral neural foraminal narrowing” was it?)

What’s this got to do with my current state? No getting sick in the surf story here. Oh another aside on that, just a week later the world’s best surfers including the GOAT surfer descended onto that same spot along with about a dozen or so photo and film crew to capture that very same surf spot supposedly break huge, like record-breaking huge. So I at least had a claim to fame with my surf posse. Yeah, me and Kelly Slater, we surf the same spot just last week (truth be bended).

So anyway (would rather talk about surfing all day honestly) days 1-5 of chemo (infusion being day 1), we have established are side effect days. It’s balancing spinning plates on hands, heads and feet dealing with side effects type of days. Day 6, I was back at work. Work from home these days fortunately as I had to run off at the tail end of a meeting to, uh, lavatory. Ran off at the beginning of another to, uh, lavatory the other way. Ran off in the middle of another meeting, to… you get it. But I worked, I even ran my own Core Team meeting without needing to run off. Was still weak, but I attribute that mostly to losing 5% of my body weight in 5 days. And before you go ooh free Weight Watchers on me, yes we both know this is the kind of weight you only lose for the duration of weigh in (i.e. I will gain it back. Exhibit A, I doordashed McD’s this evening. A combination of, one, eat whatever the heck you want you’re fighting for your life (yes, yes, hyperbole) and, two, eat something you don’t much care to lose the taste for in your normal life. Did I mention my taste buds are on hiatus?

I keep losing my place in the story….Right Day 6, I woke up feeling so good. Relative to how crummy the past couple weeks have been since my chemo port install nausea situation, that is. Good is a mile away from actually normal good. But it was good enough for me to power through all my meetings, then we went for a walk around my neighborhood to get milk. If you know my neighborhood, nay, my block at all, any walk in the walkable direction (read: safe, pretty) is a hill. And by hill, I mean top 10 steepest streets in San Francisco hill-y. Let’s not get carried away, I walked maybe 2/3 of a mile uphill to the grocer and then downhill home. But I was winded, so we’re calling that a workout. I called into a couple more meetings then I baked bread. Like 2 different kinds of the kind you need to knead: pandesal which is a Filipino breakfast roll, and cinnamon roll. I was running around the kitchen for several hours with maybe half an hour sitting on the couch to chat with my former neighbor who came to visit (hi BR!). I helped tidy the kitchen, socialized some more…it was a full evening. Around 10 pm, it hit me. I was freezing. Like teeth chattering cold. I quickly to bed and my niece rescued me with blankets, warm tea and a hot water bag to keep under the sheets. I dry heaved into a puke bag. Head pounded. We were worried I’d spike a fever, so I took some analgesics. Fortunately that shivering came and went. I managed to eat a proper dinner (in bed), watched some Midnight Stories: Tokyo — japanese food videos are my new favorite thing — and promptly fell asleep before midnight.

I’ve spent a lot of time the last week cataloguing my side effects because I think they will be indicative of how the rest of my chemo cycles will go. It makes me feel like I have some semblance of control because I can plan for and around this thing, you know? It’s not naivete. I know things can turn and morph, but let’s call it data. Start with data. Before this I only have a smattering of information from other patients who underwent TCHP. I’m that particle in the box in Schrodinger’s equation. I am a solution to the wavefunction that resolves the probabilities. For my case anyway, I’m the one that matters. Everyone else’s was a probability of happening. So when I say Days 1-5 are sick days, I will operate under the assumptions that the next 5 cycles are such. I may be sicker, I may have new side effects (hair loss is still coming my way, and this throat soreness and mouth canker sores are making a slow and steady approach), but, regardless, those days are sacrosanct. I will take days off work, I will ask for help from my community, I will rest. Now day 6 is a no-fun work day. I’ll take that over a too-sick, no work day! Day 7 is a mystery because like this whole complex tale I just told involving Panama and goats — I messed it up! I don’t know. For now I’ll consider it a don’t eff around December, sit your butt down and heal. I’ll work. It’ll typically land on my heaviest meetings days moving forward, but I think I’ll generally feel pretty decent.

Day 8 … one week one from infusion: I’m feeling pretty great. There’s only diarrhea. You know it ain’t a cancer/chemo blog unless there’s poop. Constitution of which: weak af.