When you’re diagnosed with a rare
cancer at 25, everyone wants you to
spout happy thoughts and sing Kumbaya.
Screw that. US Cosmo’s beauty editor
Deanna Pai is pissed off and owning it
I
really like to hate-read
wrenching cancer-scare stories,
about how someone found a lump,
but that it wasn’t cancer and the
experience changed her forever,
and she now eats kale salads and
has an appreciation of hummingbirds.
Meanwhile, I’m busy rummaging
around my desk at work, sniffing out
Twix bars like a truff le pig, when my
doctor calls to tell me that I have two
tumours on my liver. The disease I’d
thought was gone for good nearly two
years ago is back. I f lee to the office
conference room, call my mum and sob
for 15 minutes. Then I get back to my
to-do list. OK. I have cancer. I need
chemo. And I still need that Twix.
I have hepatoblastoma, a type of
liver cancer (which has nothing to do
with alcohol intake, although my mum
still side-eyes the two-litre bottle of
Bombay Sapphire gin on my bar cart),
and I’m on my third of four rounds of
chemo, which in total will take three
months. Chemo, which blindly destroys
cells and, ideally, kills the traitorous
one in the process, comes with a huge
laundry list of side effects: infertility,
nerve damage, heart failure, kidney
failure and even leukaemia.
Yes, treating cancer can actually
give you cancer. Treating this disease
with chemo is like playing Whac-A-
Mole with death – you either die from
the cancer now or, a few years down
the road, kick it from one of chemo’s
side effects. My cancer doesn’t cause
any symptoms (besides, obviously,eventual death), but the chemo makes
up for it. I feel like I haven’t slept since
November. I have so many aches and
pains that I might as well learn to play
bridge and take up backgammon.
But I really want to wife-up my
boyfriend, Tim. I want kids. I want to
see the Northern Lights. So I shut up,
show up, hold out my arm
and let all four chemo
drugs seep into me.
Sometimes, I’m the
Good Cancer Patient. I
joke with the nurses and
share snacks. Other times,
I just sulk in silence. I’m
mourning the loss of what
I believed my entire life
would look like, and in the stages of
grief, I’m stuck on Anger. I feel like
indignation will consume me and I’ll
have turned into Gollum by the time
this all ends. I’m carrying this “One
Ring to Rule Them All” by myself,
and it’s incredibly isolating.
Literally. Hepatoblastoma is the
most common liver cancer in infants,
but I appear to be only the 46th adult
ever diagnosed with it, and my doctor
says I’m the first to have caught it in
Stage 1. I was feeling perfectly fine
when my gyno first felt a lump during
a routine exam in early 2013. I told her
I’d simply wait for it to go away since
I couldn’t feel it myself, but then she
responded by basically shoving me into
the MRI machine, which showed that
said lump was a liver tumour the size
of a grapefruit. A few weeks after that,I had surgery and the doctors fully
removed it. Chemo was optional, so
I promptly turned it down.
The whole thing happened so
quickly – cancer one day and then gone
the next – that I didn’t actually feel as
if I’d legit “had cancer”. But here I am
now, a full-on bald, weak, bitchy little
cancer patient.Why is this happening
to me?
Look, I’m not exactly the
patron saint of healthy habits. I can eat
an entire wheel of cheese in a single
sitting, and I’ve never met an oatmeal-
raisin cookie I didn’t immediately lick
to mark as my territory. But then I also
swam competitively for 12 years. I run.
And I brew six cups of green tea a day.
I even pop Brussels sprouts like candy
straight from the roasting pan while
I’m watching The Mindy
Project. How am I the
cancer patient? How? I
need an explanation, but
it turns out there is none.
Researchers at Baltimore’s
Johns Hopkins University
found that many types of
cancers are, just like mine,
plain old bad luck.
I feel better in the waiting room
at Memorial Sloan Kettering, NYC’s
famed cancer centre, surrounded by all
the other unlucky people. We’re in this
together, even if most of them are old
and decrepit and have already had the
chance to live their lives.
Then I step back outside and see
the people whose veins are whole, who
have hair on their heads and who didn’t
spend a large part of their morning
being stabbed repeatedly with giant
needles. I hate and envy them all. But
nothing, and I mean nothing, pisses me
off quite like a smoker. Really? You
want to look like me?
My best friend has smoked for
the last 10 years and I lose it when I
spot her, lit cigarette in hand, before
we meet for dinner. I resent her. I’ve
smoked for zero years and yet >“I shut up,
show up, hold
out my arm
and let all four
chemo drugs
seep into me”and it sucks