There's nothing more American than chemo with a laptop

sharing my story with the young adult cancer community

Most of the way through my chemo treatments for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, I discovered the magazine, Elephants and Tea. Their tagline: the elephant in the room is cancer, tea is the relief conversation provides.

I can’t remember how it came across my radar, probably an Instagram ad or someone I followed there who was a cancer survivor. I couldn’t believe there was a specific magazine for adolescent and young adult cancer patients and survivors and a little disappointed I only learned about it with a couple of months to go in my own treatments. I signed up as a patient to receive the magazines each month for free and excitedly thumbed through the pages of the first issue that arrived in my mailbox while sitting on my patio.

So many stories: some like mine, some different. Such a rich diversity of opinions right next to one another—not everyone saw things in the same way and it was all included. The bios of authors were people like me: current patients, survivors of skin cancers, ovarian cancers, and lymphomas.

I submitted a story to the September issue, Words Matter.

It’s hard to describe how connected I already felt to this community of writers and readers who I had never met and how much it meant to be able to share a story of my own. I excitedly told my friends and family when it was selected for publication.

There’s something surreal seeing your own words in print. That was so much more than enough for me. And then I was invited to the magazine launch in Boston to read my piece in a room full of people in this community.

On the first night, I met two other authors who had experiences with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After I read my piece, another woman in the room came up to me and shared that she was at the same conference I mention in my article, where I had felt so alone. She also worked at an immigrant-serving nonprofit and she had recently gone through her own cancer treatments as a young adult.

I have never been in a room like that before: patients, caregivers, friends and family, survivors. It was exactly the right group to share the first excerpt I’ve shared publicly of the book I’ve been working on.

Today, I’m grateful to share my story here, originally published in the September 2023 issue of Elephants and Tea.

---

There’s Nothing More American than Chemo with a Laptop

I’m across the country from my home at a Conference Center in Vegas. It’s two days after my diagnosis and less than a week before I start chemo. When I asked my oncologist the day I was diagnosed if I could still go on a work trip to the largest immigration conference in the country he smiled, pumped his fist in the air, and told me to “win big!”

So I’m here. I’ve been sitting in the back of the ballroom with my phone on vibrate so I can take calls between sessions to schedule my surgeries, treatments, and talk to fertility doctors.

Today at lunch, I’m sitting at the back table again. For some reason it’s become a popular spot for some of the high profile attendees and speakers. Across the table from me is one of the speakers, to my left two women who advocate for immigrant rights at the southern border, to my right a white woman in a suit who introduces herself as a lobbyist from D.C. Her hair is trimmed close to her head and she speaks decisively. She asks me questions about refugee resettlement. She and the speaker jump between discussing Congresspeople from each state and their stance on immigration and a host of relevant policies and bills making their way through the House and Senate. 

“No, he won’t go against title 42, maybe to vote but not to lead,” she says.

“What about the other delegate?” he asks.

“Unlikely,” she replies.

I nod like I know what they’re talking about. I’m only half listening, but I will gratefully play the part of some regular, healthy person who understands the intricacies of our Congress and where everyone stands on asylum seekers at the southern border. I still have all my hair, no one knows I’m sick but me.

“Do we have sympathetic leadership in Pennsylvania?” She turns to me.

“Yes,” I say. “Our governor. And, at least locally in Pittsburgh, our mayor is supportive,” I add, though I’m not sure it’s at all pertinent to their conversation which continues as she turns her attention back to the speaker. I pick at my plate, standard conference food. The two are onto another bill now they refer to only by number when I hear her say this.

“Yeah, she has breast cancer,” the D.C. woman smiles. “But she’s going to keep working through it so we have no chance of getting the legislation through while she’s getting treatments.”

The man nods.

“There’s nothing more American than being tied up to a chemo machine with a laptop,” the D.C. woman laughs. She looks to me and the others at the table to appreciate her hilarity. 

My heart drops. I’m not sure if I laugh along with the table, but I probably do as a reflex. Inside I’m on the verge of something else.

The first question I asked at my diagnosis was “can I work through this?” and here I am at a work conference where no one knows what’s happening in my body. 

It’s true we’re obsessed in this country. But among the worst things I can imagine for myself in the coming months is being injected with poison while I frantically try to keep on top of emails in the Cancer Center. There must be more than this. 

I excuse myself. I’m exhausted in the middle of the afternoon and need to lie down.

In the U.S., we tend to see people as their jobs. The first question we ask when we meet someone new is “what do you do?” not “who are you?” In this country, we’re really only comfortable with someone’s humanity if they have visible physical differences, and sometimes not even then. I think back to the years I was unmedicated and dealing with invisible disability every day without ever canceling, pausing or quitting unless I inevitably became physically sick from exhaustion. Stopping and slowing down were not an option. I am what I do, I used to think. 

But now I have cancer. My humanity will be written all over my body–in the cotton of my scarf, along the port scar in my chest, the healing tissue of my neck. 

After one chemo treatment I give myself permission. If ever there was an excuse to finally take care of myself above everything else, it’s this. So I quit, cancel, stop, or pause everything that is not my full-time job. There’s grief in what I have to step back from, so many things I love, but I have to admit there's excitement too. 

I take my resolve and turn it outward. I start telling people. They’ll find out soon enough on a Zoom call when my hair is gone or I start wearing scarves or wigs every time we speak. 

I spend a morning sending texts, emails and Slack messages to the four boards I’m serving on, to the yoga studios where I’ve been teaching, virtual events I have RSVP’d to, and consulting projects. And I make a commitment to myself: I won’t work over 40 hours a week anymore.

I have cancer.

It doesn’t make me want to cry every time I say it now. It’s transforming from a nightmare to a truth. I was diagnosed with cancer and I’m going to have to take a step back. Everyone understands. I’m grateful. The next six months of treatments stretch out in front of me in blankness, stillness, somewhere soft to land and quiet to sleep. Somewhere where solitary people live. Where I’ll learn to live too.

I keep my promise to myself. During my treatment I never work overtime. I take every Friday off for my chemo treatments and do not once bring my laptop with me to the Cancer Center. My boss offers to join me for a treatment and asks if there’s wifi. I remember the D.C. lobbyist in Vegas. There are so many other friends and family who join me for my treatments I never take her up on the offer. I will not bring work into the Cancer Center.

I spend each weekend recovering.

I can’t stop working entirely, I need my health insurance. And, truthfully, it gives me a purpose, a distraction, a focus that’s outside of these cells. Even still, I have an image of the line I will not cross. I will not be caught in the machine while tied to a machine. I will not become so obsessed with the logistics and production we value so highly that I lose sight of and time for my favorite parts of life, for what makes me me. 

Everything does not happen for a reason. But I will make meaning here. Something I can only do if I make space for healing, for rest, for regeneration, space that I protect from being consumed by work.

The lobbyist’s statement strikes me as true–”there’s nothing more American than chemo with a laptop.” I hate the way she said it, the tone, that it was a punchline. She didn’t know she was sitting next to someone with cancer (I imagine we all are, far more often than we realize). 

But her comment did one important thing. It gave me a crystal clear boundary. It painted me a picture of myself on an alternate timeline. Shallow eyes, head scarf, IV stand on my left, laptop propped up to my right. An image that thankfully never existed in reality through the six months of treatments.