A friend just started chemo this week, and it got me remembering all the good times. Good times, seriously?

Seriously. Now that I’m in the throes of pulling myself back together again, I look back on it fondly. Making the mess was way more fun than cleaning it up.

There was fear, don’t get me wrong–insane amounts of it. But that’s why I wrote my muses. Keep the serious stuff for the doctors, and make light of the rest. It turns out we had a blast! We laughed through chemo and felt the love in ways we never dreamed humanly possible.

But now for the breakdown. It’s a toss-up. Kind of like trying to decide which is a better song: “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper or “What The World Needs Now” by Dionne Warwick. So how about a little of both.

What I Miss Most About Chemo:

1. THE LOVE! It’s like I was living on a planet of love–enveloped in a womb of protection. That’s all I felt. It’s all I knew how to say: “I love you more” became my motto. My chemo doctor asked me, while you were living in your right brain, who was doing all the left brain stuff for you? Everybody else. You! That’s Who!!
2. LOSING MY HAIR! My greatest fear/obsessions turned out to be one of my greatest loves. I got to crack so many jokes because of it. (Or maybe this should go under the fun category). I wore a silk cap to bed and woke up to count how many hairs fell out during the night. I stopped scrubbing my hair entirely. Once a week, I’d dab shampoo on and rush under the water just long enough so nothing more would accidentally fall out. My friend asked me why it was such a big fear. It was a good question that I couldn’t answer, and then I said, “I guess I don’t want people to see me as a cancer patient.”
3. PEOPLE SAW ME AS A CANCER PATIENT! OMG, people were so incredible to me. Elite status on the airlines’ pales to this. I remember ramming my cart into a lady at Costco, and she turned around and apologized to me! I still love walking into the hospital for my infusions every three weeks, feeling like I own the place. Who knew I’d get such a high when the guards look at me and say, “Oh, you know where you’re going.”
4. NOT RELYING ON MY INTELLECT! But whatever it is, I call it being “dumbified.” Once I stopped leaning on my intelligence, I was like the wild-eyed two-year-old. I delighted in having ideas for my weekly muse just come to me fully formed without putting any thought into it. (It was quite another thing trying to make sense of the finished product that was in my head). I grew up wanting to be a ventriloquist and ended up becoming the dummy instead. As a writer, I spent my whole life trying to access my right brain. It had been there all along.
5. FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE NO JUDGMENT ZONE! Let’s face it, we all want to put our best foot forward, but I was too dumb during chemo for a reason. By the time I lost my eyebrows and eyelashes, I didn’t even notice they were missing. I wrote my muses and didn’t care if anyone read them, or if someone unsubscribed from my mailing list, or if I made a fool of myself, or bored people, or said the wrong thing. (Knowing how far I had gone into this territory, I did have Skylar become my editor, so there was at least one filter between me and making a permanent fool of myself). Just as I didn’t care what anybody thought, I stopped ridiculing myself. My inner critic went away. See what I mean by feeling true love?

Do I miss the love or the fun? It’s a toss-up! But whatever the case, hats off to chemo–I couldn’t have learned these valuable lessons without you. And it’s my dear wish for everyone going through chemo, like you now, dear MBP, that you find the love and fun on your journey, too.

Stay tuned for Part Two next week!