Are You My Guru? by Wendy Shanker

Author:Wendy Shanker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

JANUARY 2004

Stitched up, unemployed, and quarantined from others’ germs in my apartment, I started Dapsone, a prophylactic (hee, hee) drug meant to protect me from contracting pneumonia while my immune system was being compromised. My mouth and lips blew up; my tongue swelled with blisters. An allergic chemical burn seared the skin on my torso, arms, and legs. I looked like a cheeseless pizza. I would open all the windows to the winter cold and take all my clothes off—it hurt to even wear a robe—and still feel boiling hot. It itched like crazy and lasted for almost three weeks.

My doctors knew I was allergic to sulfur from that long-ago Bactrim episode; there was no way I had been prescribed a sulfa drug, right? Wrong. They forgot. Dapsone was indeed a sulfa drug. So why was it prescribed in the first place? For the classic reason: “protocol.” Three antibiotics were added to prevent the burn from evolving into Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a disease that causes your skin to peel off. The drug I used to replace Dapsone made me so nauseous that I threw it up. No more prophylactics.

We added Valium and Restoril to keep me from weeping at least three times a day, moving through steroid-inspired cycles of mania and despair. Nutty and paranoid, I began to see little starfish people (like that little peachy one in Finding Nemo) dancing around my friends’ faces on the rare occasions that anyone came by. Some people long for company when they’re sick, but I felt shitty and antisocial, and the last thing I wanted was other people wallowing around in my cloud of misery. My book publisher called to see if I could do a photo shoot to accompany the excerpt that was going to run in Self. I didn’t want them to know I was such a wreck, and might not be able to promote the book. “I can’t,” I said weakly, drumming up an excuse. “I’m . . . in Florida.”

My hair fell out—but not evenly. It was more like I lost clumps from the top of my head. I balanced it out by growing more fuzz on my arms, shoulders, and face. I wasn’t sick enough to die, but I wasn’t well enough to live my normal life. I also feared that the treatment was worse than the disease. With all this chemo, I could be kissing my fertility good-bye while opening myself up to a lifetime of secondary cancers and other systemic disorders. My ob-gyn tossed Ortho Tri-Cyclen in the mix to regulate my hormones and try to cling to a monthly period, ’cause when you’re already a walking drug cocktail . . . why not?

My usual exercise routine of gym time—something that kept me sane as well as fit, if not thin—went out the window (probably the one where I sliced open my face). It was all I could do to shuffle from my bed to my bathroom. Plus the Cytoxan killed my taste buds. Everything tasted like sandpaper.

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