Detox

I’m not a big Eat, Pray, Love fan.  I like to eat, praying has found its place in my life and it's true, I love the love, but the Elizabeth Gilbert/Julia Roberts version leaves me pretty…meh.  I have a copy on my bookshelf though and for one reason, I’m not likely to get rid of it. 

The opening of the book stuck with me (well, it’s also stuck with me that she sat and meditated with mosquitoes biting her for something like 102 hours in 150 degree heat and I just wanted, for the love of GOD, for her to come to her senses, get the hell out of that mess and take an Aveeno bath.)  The beginning is where she is gripped by depression and I just wanted to applaud her for being so honest about what it felt like to be so desperate for relief from the feelings that had overtaken her.

Depression is an insidious thing.  It feeds on itself, begets isolation, turns you into someone you are not and is no damn joke.

When I first met my oncologist a few months ago, we agreed that given the hormone receptor positive status of my cancer, the drug Tamoxifen would be worth trying.  Essentially, it blocks the estrogen that fed my tumors, so in theory it would cut my chance of recurrence by 50%.  It was pretty much a no brainer, I’d take the drug.  I had some concerns, I don’t do well with meds that screw with my hormones, but again, I wanted to be proactive in keeping myself well.

I took the first pill with a little bit of fanfare.  It is a five-year course of meds, the first of nearly 2,000 days of this drug.  I slipped the chalky little white pill onto my tongue and washed it down with a sip of cold white wine.  Cheers, baby.

I keep a journal, and in the month or so since I began the drug, I have come to rely both on it and a small circle of very close friends to dissect what happened to me once the Tamoxifen set to work. 

Three days after I started the meds, I started feeling pretty blue.  This wasn’t exactly a shocker.  I’d joked recently that my life was being written by a couple of young screenplay writers who’d gotten drunk and didn’t know when enough was enough in writing out a craptastic series of events in a girl’s life.  Still, I’ve been walking this road for a while now and I felt like I was handling things pretty well,  so when I started to cry a few flags went up.

I’d start to cry as soon as the kids were off to school, I cried on my way to my own classes and on the way home.  I began to cry whenever I was alone.  I wrote in my journal that it was harder and harder to see joy.  The days went on, I did not care about food, wine helped mellow my evenings until I thought maybe it was the cause of the blistering insomnia that was leaving me on two or three hours of sleep a night.  When I woke, I began to cry again.  I cried so much my eyes hurt, and the close circle of friends circled closer, held me tighter and began to suggest that there was something deeper going on.  I resisted.  I’m strong. 

I tried to run it out.  I ran further and would to weep until I had to stop, double over and sob midrun.  I had also begun to feel like there were hands wrapped tight around my throat all of the time.  I looked forward to nothing but bedtime.  My mind was darker than it has ever been.  I didn't recognize myself. I read back now, journal and texts, that each day was worse than the next, until finally I could not see getting through to the end of the day.  I called my oncologist and when I could not speak to someone immediately, I drove myself to the office, they took one look at me and ushered me into an examining room. 

Shock registered on the doctor’s face when he walked in.  I’m a thoughtful girl, I recognize that the spectrum of life includes thrill and content, reservation and abandon, joy and pain; but my mind was stuck in a morass of sadness that reached beyond anything I’d known.  He looked at me, and said simply

“What.  Happened?”

Tamoxifen had happened.  In the list of eleventy trillion possible side effects of any drug, you can usually find depression, insomnia too.  Those were mine to have and to hold. 

He took me off the drug immediately, which had begun to feel like poison each time I took it.  He prescribed an anxiety drug to get me past the crisis of detox.  I do not use the word crisis lightly; in fact I do not use it at all.  It was what the circle of friends reminded me I was in, as they each kept their phones nearby and walked me through the worst.  On the worst night, my friend Teri promised that all I had to do was get through the next five minutes, and the next and the next until morning.  It was as far ahead as I could see.

I have been climbing out of that dark place for close to a week now.  I’m lucky in that I know the half-life of the drug and have an idea of when it’ll be gone from my system.  I’m shaky, but better each day.  It is an extraordinary thing to witness the vast and powerful effect of chemicals on our brains. Our bodies are elegant machines, but they are machines nonetheless and some imbalance can have catastrophic cascade effect.  I know several people on the Tamoxifen who are doing fantastically well, and statistically, what happened to me was pretty rare.

That I had the wherewithal to journal that descent, and people who know me well enough to be my steady, dedicated sanity when mine was pretty questionable were and are my salvation.   

On that very black Monday, a friend who had gone through this exact dark place and had someone next to her throughout promised to keep her phone on her pillow and come to me the second I needed her to.  I told her that I didn’t know how to thank her.  She told me that I would one day lift someone else the same way.