For a number of years until I was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I have been battling with systemic candida. For those of you who have the fortune of not knowing what this is, let me tell you a little something about this most silent of killers. Except that, no, it’s far from noiseless. I think of it more as a sexy vixen vampire of sorts, the short-skirt tight-top kind splattered over our TV screens today drawing you in with their lure of passionate lust and desire, of immeasurable pleasures…until they sink their teeth into that neck vein of yours and suddenly you find yourself doomed for all eternity: immortal, but feeding off the blood of the shopkeeper you bought your new shoes from just this afternoon.
Candida albicans, the one I play host to, is a fungus found naturally within all our bodies. Its usual function is helping to detect and destroy other pathogenic bacteria that may enter the body (why do think fallen angels do their jobs so well?) and decomposing your body once you say adios to this here life. Put simplistically (though as the majority of doctors still choose not to recognise its existence, I shall have no fear of many medical experts judging liberties taken), once it grabs hold of you in that ‘I’ve got you now, sucker’ kind of a way, it’s you or them. Because see, they literally start eating you alive (here’s where the artistic license comes in). Seriously though, gone rogue it still keeps up the good little soldier boy act it had as a decomposer, except that, oh shoot, you’re not dead yet.
That which feeds me destroys me…
Four years before I got the Big D (or ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you: you have cancer’ diagnosis), I nearly died. I just curled up one late night, screaming in pain, and decided this was it: since no one should ever have to suffer like this, unexpectedly and undeservingly (I had been hard at work doing *good* deeds all day) I was giving myself over to the Eternal side. I rolled over – whether to play dead or attempt an escape from the force that was ripping my abdomen in ten, I don’t know. Of course, the sensible thing triumphed over its cowardly counterpart, and off to the emergency ward it was. Four nights in a row, as it happened. The diagnosis was the same at night as those of the doctor’s visits during sunshine hours: bladder infection. All it was, all it could be, all the medical journals would talk about. So I was shooed off home with packets of antibiotics in tow.
That started me on a quest to find The Answer. Little did I know at the time the light at the end of the tunnel was so much brighter than I’d set out for it to be. I was determined to find the answer to a health issue that was becoming more serious by the day: from delirious pain attacks, it digressed to sudden and mysterious weight gain (that would last and last and last forever and two days); hair loss – the dry lifeless tresses it had become, anyway; adult acne, a pale dull grey complexion to replace the ruddy-happy face I used to sport; fatigue so great that it became near impossible to eat without taking a death-becomes-me nap straight afterward; and memory loss so inexplicable – and substantial – that I seriously started to believe one’s IQ might have an expiry date after all.
In retrospect, these are all issues of a serious nature that should propel one to find a cure and damn well *cure it*. Seek I did. “Cures” I tried. Doctors and specialists alike were ‘baffled’. Now, in the past when I’d read that word, I took it to mean someone would be left wondering about the question at hand until they Eureka‘d! the answer and then we’d have a happy-ever-after. In my own experience, though, it simply meant plucking a diagnosis out of the air cabinet closest to you and hanging a diagnostic tag around the patient’s neck with symptoms that most closely resembles their own.
So the underactive thyroid and related meds didn’t fit, and neither did Metabolic Syndrome, the pills of which made me both incurably sleepy and a total insomniac at the same time – a sensation I suggest you try only if you’re trying to trigger a psychotic attack.
In the mean time, life went on as usual. There was stress, chaos, disorder and mayhem in my life: typical modern existence, and a little lot extra as I waged through the number of life crises thrown my way after someone seemed to have had too heavy a hand when doling out karma-spice.
Finally the big sky veil lifted, in part, and candida became part of the dialogue. Ah. Now I understood. This was what all the symptoms was pointing at! Finally! You won’t know the sweet bliss of figuring out what the hell was wrong with you all that time unless you’ve tasted its intoxicating fruits yourself.
Cucumber Quest, a comic housed at http://cucumber.gigidigi.com/
But that’s when the true battle started. And I do mean battle in the bloodiest sense of the word, for that was exactly the kind of senseless war I waged with my insides. Learning about these little thingies inside me wanting to hurt me by eating my body’s glucose and getting fermentedly drunk on it – making me just as intoxicated* in the process – was one thing. Having to go on the rampage and kill them off like the blood (or sugar) thirsty brutes they themselves were? Quite another.
* Candida is like a mean girl in high school: it creates and releases shit like ethanol (a.k.a alcohol) and acetaldehyde (the stuff hangovers are made of) in your unsuspecting bloodstream, to the utter worried confusion of your boss.
You might wonder what I’m getting at. It’s not because of a dutiful obligation to share battle scars with a fellow sick one. It’s because four years after I first experienced their siege, that night when they breached the walls of my insides and gave me the worst pain I have ever known, their empire had so extended that they gave me cancer.
And they “won” – though I shall win this cancer-thing, and the candida alongside of it – because I wouldn’t, couldn’t, fight them. For one born under the sign of the god of war, I prefer my battles when they don’t include killing any other organisms – innards and their pathogens included.
What was the solution? What was I to do instead, when there was no road ahead *but* to rid myself of these lethal invaders? I didn’t know. And so I got cancer, as yet another puzzle piece in the Great Quest to find the (bigger than I possibly imagined) Answer. And only when I heard that death was suddenly a very real possibility for this youngish mother who had an angel-boy and heaven-man to live for, did I come face to face with my salvation.
This blog is the result.
Years of self-hate, of bitter, black, festering loathing for everything I was, gave way when I voiced the realisation that I sure as hell couldn’t *hate* cells, cancerous or not, when they were my own!
Explain to me how you would be filled with dark emotion for tumor-clad ovaries that had given you the miracle of a lovelier-than-life baby just a few years ago? A pelvis, now swarming with evil-eyed foreign bodies, that made you woman? A tummy that, ineffective and downright dangerous it had become, is still keeping me alive (for who has ever seen a two-legs without a middle section to sustain them?)? I can’t hate! No, on the contrary…I am filled with so much love for these poor parts of me so sickened by the ABCs of illness.
And so I love. And so, in turn, I heal. This is my story. Yours are in here too. Let the days begin!
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