My Four Week Adventure with "Chemo-Face"

Four weeks ago today I drove to the pharmacy with determination in my step and retrieved medicine labeled “dangerous” and started applying it to my face. The pharmacist assistant didn’t send the pharmacist over for a consult. In a rare moment of “I’m doing this!” I subtracted the need for answers and made my way home to start using the stuff.

Here I was then:

This is my pensive, no commentary added look before the effects started happening. I was scared. I can't remember what I was looking at here.

In these four weeks so much has changed.

Here I am now:

This was taken on Friday. I was watching clouds float as I waited outside the Rice Bowl in Downtown Bakersfield.

My perspectives, my self-image and unfortunately, the continuing bad taste in the back of my throat remind me I purposefully took action to take a possible future of more cancers on my face and hopefully lessened the possibility.

I wrote several blog posts during the process and felt it right and fitting to write a celebratory note now.

Twenty six months ago I first met “Nora” the pet name I gave to the melanoma that once lived on my face. I used to call her “my” melanoma. I don’t anymore.

I’ve had two surgeries on my face, both aimed at healing my melanoma. I have also had a precancerous spot removed via freezing. When I went into my most recent dermatology appointments (an every six month ritual now) my new doctor surveyed my face and ordered this medicine, warning me it would take up to four weeks before I would want to make any “public appearances.”

My Pollyanna self said, “I’ll be one of those who doesn’t have side effects.”

Note to self and selves out there, reading. When your medicine openly talks about being dangerous and hazardous and poison, chances are you will have side effects.

Six days into Chemo-Face you can see the battle for my face. Note the actinic kerotisis showing up more clearly on my forehead. There was a lot on my cheeks, too, but the scarf hides those pretty well.

PS - Application on the face impacts your internal organs, too.

P.S. S. - It will impact your heart, your self-confidence and for me, made me want to retreat. Because this cocooning tendency in me looks like depression, this may be problematic.

I am still more tired than usual, but I feel optimistic as well.

Somehow going through a lot has awakened my sense of who I’ve been all along. I’ve been picking up pieces of threads I dropped years ago in the haziness of loss and tragedy and sorrow. I’m not lamenting the dropped-for-a-while threads, I’m rejoicing in the picking up.

Perhaps my boldest move while in full chemo-face mode: performing in an Open Mic. I had to do it, though. The poem was demanding it of me.

Like so many of my life experiences, they have been worth it - even though during the process of it I might have wondered.

As my friend Michelle likes to say, “Love wins.”

Yes, my loves, it does. Even if it doesn’t look like what you thought you wanted. And even when it does.

My notebook and pencil are always near by. :-) Thank you, Sofia, for taking this photo during yesterday's writing playground.

Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming Fall and Winter, 2014 and beyond.

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