Surviving Cancer

by Julia Wolf

“…and it was a new dawn, sir, and Harry Potter shone like a beacon of hope for those of us who thought the Dark days would never end…” – Dobby, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I choose Chair #2. It faces the nurses’ station and has a full view of Victoria’s winter skies, only 20-odd feet from the nearest washroom, the same distance to the entrance so I can see the smiling volunteers swing in with their drinks and snacks cart. It’s always empty, waiting for me when I check in every third or fourth Monday, depending on the strength of my immune system. My drug protocol, a personal cocktail of steroids and toxins, takes about five hours to drip from the series of bags labelled with my name and birth date suspended above me, down through the network of narrow tubes and the needle to a plump vein just above my wrist. I’m right-handed, and it’s easier for me to turn the pages of my book if my left arm is hooked up to the IV. During these five hours, which somehow pass more quickly with every treatment as I’ve relaxed into the padded vinyl, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who else has sat in Chair #2—not the name of their cancer but the arc of their story, where they’ve travelled from that day, what friend or book they brought along to keep them company. I like to pass my time here with Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived.

“Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” – Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer in October 2008. The timing first struck me as a very sick cosmic joke. Agreed, there isn’t a good time to find out you have cancer but, in my case, it was almost laughably ironic. I’d just landed an internship with an exciting publishing company and felt like the luckiest human on the planet. I remember telling my husband over a celebratory glass of wine, “This is my dream come true. I keep thinking it’s too good to be true. Pinch me.” And then the call from my gynecologist came.

I’ve come to think of cancer as my personal Voldemort. The dreaded C word has held a lot of power in my family. My brother Peter, my only sibling, died of a malignant brain tumour in April, 2007. My very first thought after I received my diagnosis was, how am I going to tell my parents? I couldn’t bring myself to say more than “abnormal biopsy” and “hysterectomy” to them, but they knew what that really meant: the C word was back in our lives. I called them again the next day for a more frank discussion of my diagnosis and swore I wouldn’t make the same mistake with my sons.

Children need simple, honest, accurate information after a parent’s diagnosis. To deny them this sends a message that their family is holding a dark, terrible secret, that they should be fearful and hide their feelings. They also have the right to deal with the diagnosis on their own terms, as long as the door to talking about their feelings is always left open. My sons are 17 and 12, with very different personalities and social needs; they made their own choices about who they wanted to tell and how they cope with our family’s “new normal” on a daily basis. But both of them have been compassionate, supportive and extraordinarily resilient. I can’t imagine going through the experiences of the last five months without them.

One of the undercurrents in the Harry Potter series is Harry’s need for the truth, his frustration with well-meaning adults who limit his knowledge and thus his capacity to confront his destiny and make decisions. Even the great wizard Dumbledore recognizes that he has failed Harry several times in this sense, that love and the desire to protect has hampered his wisdom. It is difficult to balance a child’s right to the truth with the harsh reality of a cancer diagnosis. My own decision has been to give mine details when they need them, be centred when I do, invite questions, and never lie to them. The rest is an open book as we all find our way through this.

“ No good sittin’ worryin’ abou’ it,” he said. “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.” – Hagrid, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Why me? Harry doesn’t spend much time asking himself this question. He accepts that while he has a circle of support, there is a solitude in his battle against Voldemort that he must bear and he arms himself as best as he can. This duality is something I’ve repeatedly experienced as a cancer survivor. The chemo room at the Victoria B.C. Cancer Agency is a bright, open, welcoming space and I’ve felt a kinship with the other patients during every treatment, whether I chat with the people beside me or not. I suspect that if there was a Mirror of Erised in that room, the “deepest, most desperate desire” reflected back to each of us would be a cancer-free self. At the same time, there is an aspect to our journey which is solitary. Short of a belief in a divine and personal power, there is no one else who can carry our disease for us. I know people who love me enough to do so, but they can’t. And herein lies my paradox and Harry’s: it is our solitude which becomes the wellspring of our resilience.

The hardest part of my journey has been the waiting. Every appointment on my calendar—blood tests between chemos, routine exams with oncologists, my date with Chair #2—is a milestone that I work towards one day at a time. But the wait after biopsies and scans holds me in a kind of suspended animation. It’s been easier with each one, but I still find myself awake in the dark during these times and feel my stomach clench when the phone rings.

“The charm that repels a Boggart is simple, yet it requires force of mind. You see, the thing that really finishes a Boggart is laughter.” – Professor Lupin, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I didn’t just lose my sense of humour during the first few weeks after my diagnosis; I lost my joy in other people’s laughter too. I knew that my husband and sons needed a break, that it was good for them to sit down with a comedy on Friday nights, but I didn’t want any part of it then. The first attitude adjustment came when my hair started to fall out with a vengeance. I got fed up with the mess and my daily drama in front of the mirror, and grabbed my husband’s electric clippers in a fit of temper. Shaving my head became a ritual act that gave me a sense of power, my ability and freedom to choose how I responded to the journey I was on. My eldest son cleaned up the little bits I had missed at the back when he came home from school. We had a good laugh remembering how I’d shaved his head when he was in Grade 7 for a Relay for Life fundraiser, my hands shaking so badly that I made a terrible mess of it. I turned down the brunette wigs (my natural colour) and bought a streaked blond one and a sassy black hat to match my new attitude. When I modelled the new me for my family, my youngest son said, “Cool, Mom. Do you have any more? You should get an afro. ’Fros are cool.” I smiled myself to sleep that night.

It’s ironic to me that one of the most difficult aspects of my treatment—losing my long, very thick head of hair, my brows and lashes—became my greatest source of humour. In e-mails to friends I mused as to how I could harvest my leg hairs and turn them into brows (another sick cosmic joke, ladies; the leg hair stayed). I am now the fastest one out of the bathroom (I read that Jennifer Aniston takes pride in her three-minute showers—got that beat, Jenn). I’m one of the unusual people on my drug protocol whose hair (now snow white) grows back between treatments, only to fall out again. After yet another day with Harry, I was brushing my teeth and saw the little tufts of white curls, my vanishing brows giving me a permanently arrested look, and thought, oh my, hello Hedwig. I love that little snowy owl, haven’t forgiven Rowling for killing her off in the last book.

“You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.” – Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Cancer is the great leveller. It shatters our illusion of permanence, confronts us with the trembling fragility of life, that what we prize and yet routinely take for granted can be taken from us in a heartbeat. We are all vulnerable. “Why me” then becomes the unavoidable truth of why not me? Once I wrapped my head around that truth, I was able to move past denial into acceptance. I think of the way I look at life now as my “cancer vision” and I am grateful for it. When you hold the fragility of your own life, something beautiful can arise, like Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawkes, who bursts into flames and is reborn from the ashes. Over the last five months, I’ve experienced a lifetime’s worth of love and blessings, an outpouring of support from family and friends, teachers and classmates, co-workers and casual acquaintances. I am thankful for the excellent care I’ve received from my gynecologist and oncologists, the family doctor who visited me post-surgery in the hospital every 7 a.m., the unfailingly warm and gentle nurses in the chemo room.

I am mid-way through treatment now, waiting for the results of a CT scan and the start of a five-week course of daily radiation. Like the other people who have sat in Chair #2, I am praying for a clean bill of health. But I’ve come to realize that “wellness” is much more than the state of my body, that there are gifts more permanent than my life. I think Harry would agree that despite the cost of the journey, we don’t want to trade the lessons we’ve learned, the people we’ve met along the way, the people we’ve become. But I wouldn’t mind borrowing that invisibility cloak for a few months, just until I can ditch the wig and get the mascara out again.

Julia Wolf is a mother of two sons and a creative writing student at Vancouver Island University. She is a casual librarian assistant at the Mill Bay Public Library.