Chapter 5: Treatment

In my career, my days were stacked with back to back meetings, flights, trains, hotels, presentations and performances, every 25 minutes; sometimes triple-booked, so I’d be judicious as to which important meeting and with which important people I would spend my time, always also preparing another doc, another presentation, another brief for the next meeting to follow.?

But cancer treatment kept its own cadence, both simple and modular though wholly consuming. Here I showed up while my care team did all the work.?

Everyday for eight weeks; Mondays through Fridays, pausing only for federal holidays, when I’d spend the days wondering whether my cancer, too, had taken the day off.

I had chemotherapy once a week and radiation everyday at a beautiful treatment facility for women with cancer in the organs we have that men do not. I met lovely nurses and radiation tech administrators, each new person I met represented another part of treatment for which they became my shepherd.?

Some were deeply kind, some never had the right thing to say, and some weren’t lovely at all. But I was their patient and I was important, and it was fine for all of us.

The regularity of all day chemotherapy and 3:00p radiation slid into the languid expectation of fatigue. Cancer treatment compounds exponentially, the effects more severe and exhausting over time.?Each week it would take longer for me to find strength again after chemotherapy, each week I needed more time away from my family to endure a very different postpartum recovery designed for my very survival.

And sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would read about this exotic new virus, ravaging a region in China that must be so dangerous the actual city had to be isolated from the rest of the world, a duplicitous novelty in our hyper-connected modern world.?

Instead of tuning into my cancer regime, I read the news -- I watched every news clip and scoured my feeds until all recommended articles screamed “CORONAVIRUS” as I scrolled every page, channel, site, signal and screen, amplifying images of violence and illness and hate and rage. Other people’s suffering and death: the ultimate distraction.

It helped, too, my COVID fixation, that as I lay in bed weakened and pallid from the chemo, sirens were now constantly ablaze outside our Brooklyn apartment. It was as though my body was merely the messenger — “rest now,” the Cisplatin whispered as it coursed through my shrunken veins, “the world is about to wake up to its own cancer.”

Fancy soon turned to fear, though, as COVID began making its way through the West. It had been months since I’d been on the subway, too scared to get sick from a seasonal cold or flu during treatment. Now, I went almost nowhere except for walks in Prospect Park and to and from the treatment center. It was winter, I had a newborn at home, and I said I was fine with it.

Until one night, on March 11, when America snapped to alert, finally taking the virus seriously.

We’d been home for weeks, leaving only for treatments which now came in the form of a brutalizing vaginal procedure, called?Brachytherapy, described by my Radiation Oncologist?as painful as childbirth, each of the five fractions spaced three days apart. “Count back from five, Eve, and then we’ll leave the city,” I’d tell myself for days on end, the dream of recovering in that vacation spot we loved now very much a mirage.

So I kept going, one foot in front of the other, showing up to the hospital in New York City, the newly minted COVID-19 epicenter where patients much sicker than myself were now overwhelming the hospital system writ large. And at night, drowsy from treatment and drugs and motherhood and shock, I drifted off to the fractured fairy tales of news reports so wildly different in just two week’s time.

On my last day of Brachytherapy, March 20, my doctors practically threw me out of the city, agreeing that a lower population density was safer than our home for my recovery. I couldn’t have listened to their eyes any better when they looked at me silently screaming “RUN.” Our family left the city that night and it would be a year before we processed the heartbreak of leaving so much all at once as we leapt for safety.