Wait, It Gets Worse by Lydia Slaby

Author:Lydia Slaby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disruption Books

IN APRIL 2013—six months after chemo ended, and two and a half months after my surgery—I found myself on a flight to New York, crouched over the toilet and heaving into the blue chemicals. I had spent the previous night inexplicably throwing up, and by the time the alarm went off at 5 a.m. for my flight, I thought whatever had gone through my system was done. Apparently not.

I’d insisted on making the flight for the visit not only to see my sister, but also because she lives on a farm in the Hudson River Valley. After months of living between my sterile bubble of a high-rise apartment and the sterile bubble of the hospital, I wanted to get dirty, use my muscles, and feel like a human being again. I wanted to feel the ground beneath my feet and dirt under my fingernails. I wanted to remind my psyche that I’m a child of this planet, not a product of sanitized machinery and medical procedures. I wanted to prove that despite the setback of my surgery, I was back on the path to precancer, prechemo strength. And farmwork seemed like the solution.

“What do we need to do?” I asked her as we drove away from the airport.

Corinna glanced at me. “We really need to split wood, actually. We felled a bunch of dying trees, and the logs have been cut into smaller pieces. Now we just need to split and stack them.”

“Um, with an axe? How very Paul Bunyan of us.” I had no idea how I would even lift an axe, let alone swing it with the force necessary to split a log.

“A friend lent me his splitter, so one of us can use the axe while the other one uses the splitter. And then we can switch.”

“Great. I’d like to brush my teeth and have some lunch first, though. I spent the entire flight throwing up.”

With the nonchalance of a fellow cancer survivor, she didn’t even blink. “Totally reasonable. Let me know if you’re going to puke again so I can pull over.”

That afternoon found two sisters, one six months out of chemo, the other eight months out of chemo, alternatively wielding an axe and operating a splitter capable of producing what felt like a billion tons of pressure. Like my own cancer experience, Corinna’s battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma was tentatively over. But her most recent treatment in Germany was her third chemo protocol, including stem cell replacement therapy, and her fifth medical effort to prevent her ever-dividing cancer cells from blossoming into the illness that had transformed her life seven years earlier. She, too, had been a college rower, and much of her success in life had also been the result of persistence, innate talent, and sheer force of will. So we both crossed our fingers that we were “fine,” and got to work bullying our bodies back into health.

The splitter-to-axe production ratio was approximately forty-to-one. Whichever one of us was handling the axe would bring it down on the log, make a small dent, and take a few breaths to recover.

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