Chemo Ground Zero

Week 3 of 5 rounds of chemo - and I am getting to know this particular fire. Understanding its power and how it affects me not just physically but at all levels of my being.

Chemo is definitely the nuclear option.

Two days after each session I wake up in a kind of wasteland. My energy is not just depleted, it’s hollowed out. The emptiness it leaves in its fugitive wake requires all my spiritual strength to encounter.

It’s like finding myself in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The aftermath of a volcano, perhaps, or a massive bomb-drop. It’s visual, to me, grey ashes over a trackless wasteland. My mind searches compulsively for some orientation - scrolling my phone obsessively, trying to read or watch a film. There’s nothing I can settle to, my mental energy feels fractured and chaotic.

There are no landmarks here, no paths to follow.

And although it is terrible, this emptiness, I also welcome it. It feels harsh, unmerciful in its illumination of all the ways I usually distract myself from an emptiness that, if I’m honest, has always echoed in me. It feels healing, an invitation to surrender to receptivity with no agenda, no control, no plans. Not even dreams. Because if I dream of being well again, I feel an instant upwelling of frustration that I am not there right now, and that there are no gurarantees I ever will be. And that just makes the emptiness unbearable, has me scurrying for the phone or the screen again.

I’m learning that the trick to this is an exquisite and sometimes excruciating level of presence with myself. The more I can find the deeply still place where I can be so present, the more my attachments cavort around me - entertainment, approval, productivity, happiness, wellness and fitness - like a frantic circus troupe of demons.

So, thank you Chemo Ground Zero. Thank you for your unremitting nuclear fire, for your cleansing of body and spirit and the all that ways you lead me back to myself.