How to have a brat summer while recovering from cancer?

She should be at the club

Greetings from the chemo horrors. It's going on four (only four???) gruelling months since my cancer diagnosis. In that time, I've lost most of my hair, endured seven infusions, given thanks for good nausea medication, yearned for better pain medication, soared to some high heights and crashed to some deep depths, and now find myself looking at less than two weeks until my last chemo session.

When I was first diagnosed, I anticipated writing throughout the process. But as my life shrank around my treatment, I found I didn't have much to say. The pattern of chemo is rigid: infusion, exhaustion, pain, upswing, wallop again. Not the most invigorating material to work with. Moreover, my facility with words, something I had always relied upon as a means of translating myself to myself, deserted me thanks to what I have now learned is a typical chemo side effect: brain fog. 

I've been able to accept my temporary abandonment of this project thanks to the phrase "write from the scar, not the wound": a necessary reminder that we might not have the wisest or most insightful things to say about our lives as they are happening. Some amount of processing and rumination needs to take place for experience to be shaped into something readable. 

What I have been struggling to accept is how out of the world I feel. When I first started my treatment, the limitations of a compromised immune system were novel. I was ready to endure them with patience and an understanding that they would eventually come to an end. For a while, I was enjoying experimenting with new recipes, hosting my friends for supper, and socialising in outdoor spaces. I was doing my best to be stoic and kind of succeeding. 

The end of my attempted stoicism was triggered by listening to “Guess” by Charli XCX and Billie Eilish, a song which (apologies to my parents who I know are reading this) fucks. Something about the contrast between the ascetic life of illness I was leading and the unapologetic, thumping hedonism of the song was too much for my brain to handle. It's the kind of music that evokes strobe lights and sweat¹. Glued to the couch, I played the song on repeat, wishing I had the energy to move in the way the beat demanded. My willingness to patiently endure began to erode. I started to chaff against the very necessary rules I had to follow and long for the myriad possibilities that life without cancer holds. 

I think this impatience was inevitable partly because I have been ill for a long time. I can trace what I now know to be cancer symptoms back to early 2023. Although chemo has definitely made me feel much worse than untreated cancer and has imposed stricter limitations on my behaviour, the intense fatigue I was dealing with was already impacting my ability to engage with the world in the way I wanted. It had shrunk my life even before I was put on the low microbial diet. Part of what frustrated me so much about how long it took for my treatment to start was that I felt that the cancer fatigue had already robbed me of so much joy and opportunity.

I've also just turned 25 and am having an experience that is typically reserved for later life. There is a meme about the Berenstain Bears where a Twitter user finds out Mama Bear (mother of two) is 27, and another comments "She should be at the club". The feeling that I should be at the club rather than the chemo ward grows daily. 

I’m two years younger than mama bear! I should definitely be at the club.

Now, instead of fighting the impatience, I'm trying to accept that this is another valid response to an inexpressibly awful disease. Rather than pretend that I'm okay with my strange half-life, I'm allowing myself to be grumpy about how boring and limiting cancer treatment is. I went back and forth about whether to even share this facet of my experience because it's so easy to diminish your own feelings as "whinging" and to find some way that it could be worse. But I am tired of maintaining the appearance of a stiff upper lip. Newsflash: bad things are allowed to feel bad. I also believe that there is strength in acknowledging and owning your vulnerabilities.

The reality is I just want to eat a pizza. I want to go to live music. I want to go to the movies and eat popcorn. I want to go roller skating. I want to swim in open bodies of water. I want to have the energy to exercise again. I want to be able to hang out with my friends, cook food for myself, go to the shops, without worrying about infection. I want to stop spending weeks in unmanageable pain. I want to rejoin the world that I have been forced to step out of. I want to dance to a song that fucks! 

I have one more infusion left. Two months ago that would have seemed like nothing. I have since realised it's going to be the most challenging of the whole process. Chemo symptoms are cumulative and each infusion is a bigger mountain to climb than the last. There is no "it's all downhill from here". There is only another huge push because the recovery is more demanding every time. Then there is radiation to contend with. And then there are the lingering consequences of the scorched earth approach to cancer treatment. A successful period of poisoning, one that blasts the cancer out of your body, is not overcome with two weeks of recovery. It can take a full year to return to baseline.

I'm trying to keep all this in mind; be aware that there is no bouncing back -- just a slow crawl back to normalcy. At this point, I'm a rubber band that's been left in a drawer too long: cracked and already crumbling when you try to stretch it. But I'm also looking for ways to live my own version of a brat summer and simply be young and have fun again. Cancer has robbed me of at least a year and a half of normal life. While I may not be able to jump straight back into the world, I'm going to do my damnedest to start making up for lost time. 

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“Guess” is not alone in making me dream of the (metaphorical) club throughout these weird months so if you want some insight into more of the music that has prevented me from patiently enduring, please peruse the playlist I made of all the torturously good music I’ve been listening to at your leisure.

1. A commenter described the video as having the energy of watching MTV as a kid and knowing you definitely weren’t supposed to be watching “Señorita” by Justin Timberlake. I agree.