Cancerland in Breast Cancer

Cancerland in Breast Cancer

I have been fortunate enough to travel a lot. In fact, my husband and I have been to some
amazing places around the world, and there are some places we’ve wanted to revisit but
haven’t got to yet.

However, there was one place that we had no intention of ever going back to. In 2000
my husband was diagnosed with cancer and we entered Cancerland. He went through
successful treatment and we became visitors emeriti, always somehow associated with
Cancerland but only around the edges. Sadly, in 2010 I was diagnosed with breast cancer
and we were back, both feet firmly planted in Cancerland.

I’m one of those anal types who like to plan for a trip. Maybe it is the broadcast
producer in me. Before going to a new place, I make folders full of travel articles,
restaurant reviews, notes on hidden gems to visit that I’d find out about from friends and
acquaintances. I also like to have some sense of a schedule: to know where I’m landing,
where I’m staying, what to see, and how long my trip is going to be. Well, here’s the thing
about Cancerland—one minute you are minding your own business, living your humdrum
life, and the next minute you are thrust into this strange land of surgeries, and drugs and
side effects, and pain and anxiety, and you didn’t even have a minute to prepare for it.

It’s like stumbling through the wardrobe into another world—you are about to embark
on a mysterious trip and you don’t know where it is going to end. You’ve received no
notice, no clear map, and no schedule.

Usually when you plan a trip for yourself you have a sense of who your fellow travelers
might be. When you are backpacking in the mountains, there will be the healthy, active
types. Exotic locales not much visited yet will have intrepid, adventurous types. You know
what I mean. You feel you can identify with at least some of your traveling companions.

The thing about your fellow travelers in Cancerland is that they can be anyone. Cancer
offers absolutely no barrier to entry: young, old, rich, poor, male, female, white, black,
athletic, sedentary. Cancerland is not the slightest bit discerning about whom it will allow to
visit. The only criteria—some rogue cells running around your body. That is your passport,
visa, and ticket.
There are some things worth knowing about Cancerland. The first thing is that it is an
incredibly busy place, and you will be astounded by how many people are there. The place
where you get the best sense of that is the chemotherapy infusion unit. Being there is like
going to a public beach on the hottest day of the year. Patients spewed out of the waiting
room into the corridors whenever I arrived there. And even though I had an appointment,
there was the wait, always the wait, because demand so far exceeded supply; it’s a little like
being double-booked except you’re waiting for the next free recliner or bed so that your
daylong session of poison pumping can start. At all my visits to the chemotherapy infusion
unit, it was standing room only. I half expected to hear an announcement like at a train
station: “Please stand clear of the doors, another train is following shortly.”
But there are some stops in Cancerland where you are treated like those people who can
boast of fast-track access, where you don’t have to wait with the hoi polloi but instead just
get ushered in ahead of everyone else. When you are undergoing treatment you get your
blood tested, a lot. Not for me the long wait in the main lab at the hospital full of people
with other ailments. There was a secret lab, just for those of us in Cancerland. In and out
in fifteen minutes, every week.

I hope you will not have to go to the emergency room during your treatment. I, sadly,
did. When you are really sick, the idea of an endless wait to be seen makes you feel worse.

Well, not in Cancerland. I found myself being wheeled in immediately. “Make way, chemo
patient coming through.” Small comforts, I know, but hey, you take what you can get.
Here’s another thing to know about Cancerland: the people who are your trip planners—
the doctors—have more than likely not visited themselves. They are experts, of course, and
they have packed off so many people to Cancerland that they talk a good game, almost like
they know what it’s really like. They are full of knowledge and tips, things they’ve learned
from visitors who report back. But they haven’t actually experienced it the way you and
their other patients will. The nurses are more like hotel concierges. They’ll tell you what to
expect on your visit and what to look out for and what to avoid, but they have probably not
been there themselves either. Even the most experienced of the health-care professionals
don’t know what it is like to feel as tired as you will (see “X Is for eXhaustion”) during
chemotherapy or how bloated you will feel on steroids, or the extent to which a
mastectomy really hurts.

This is precisely why it is worth seeking out the counsel of others who have been to
Cancerland, so that they can share some of their experiences with you. You will find it is
like entering a secret society. You might have known someone who has had breast cancer
treatment, and you might have thought that you sort of understood what she was going
through. But it is not until you yourself are diagnosed that you realize there was so much
you could not possibly know from the outside. Only when you are in the club yourself are
the full details of what to expect shared. What your friends share will not be a complete
map to Cancerland, because everyone’s map is unique, but it gives you the broad contours
of this place that once you enter you never really leave.