I decided to revert to that Latin proverb: “If there is no wind, row.”
So I landed in the waiting room of the Dean’s office in the Marketing Department, prepared to argue my case. He was too busy, he couldn’t see me. So I camped there. I would watch as he walked in and out, calling to me as he passed, although careful not to make eye contact, “No, no, I have an appointment,” or “No, I told you my schedule is full!” On the fourth day, he walked out of his office and with a resigned look said, “Melissa, you have five minutes.” We both knew the decision before I’d even entered his office. I started my Bachelor of Business-Marketing the very next day.
Later that year I was diagnosed with uterine cancer.
As you do with such diagnosis, I went into a state of shock and despair for a couple of days. When I saw the oncologist and they began talking about treatment, one thing became evident: I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I knew I needed to know more about what was happening
This time I went to the Dean of Science at the University. It was a lot easier to convince him as a nineteen-year-old with cancer. He customized a science course in human anatomy/ physiology for me, no doubt specially tailored to help me comprehend my own physical predicament. And there I was, doing a double degree.
I loved it! Just loved it. All my life I have had an affinity with the human body; I could sketch it, sculpt it, paint it, and convince my own to do any number of athletics: gymnastics, dance, you name it. I loved the simplicity in its symmetry, yet its utter complexity in symbiotic function.
All my life I have pushed this body of mine. Being tall and muscular, I have always loved the myriad sensations of movement, exertion, total relaxation, stretching muscles, even the muscle soreness of overexertion. So yes, I was and still am athletic.
As a child, and even more so as a teenager, I was alarmingly, or as my mother put it, “embarrassingly” thin. I ate all the time. No eating disorders, nothing like that; just a phenomenal metabolism and huge energy levels. I have always physically “moved” and it has always been my salvation. Even now I weight train and run between five and seven kilometres, several times a week. I joke that it’s my stress management, but really it’s no joke. I was only twelve or thirteen when I came to understand that if I didn’t get rid of this excessive, pent-up energy, it would get ugly. Or rather, I would get ugly. So I use it, and with each footfall, I pound the stress into the pavement.
When I was diagnosed with cancer for the first time, I started to train specifically. In all the sports and dance I had done, I had never trained “sport specific” because I was never just involved in one sport. With cancer, I entered the singular sport of survival. I would be at the gym, listening to people’s petty bitching about how someone else looked or acted. A lot of these people were in dire need of an altered perspective! I recall one lady, when her trainer asked her what she wanted to look like, pointing at me and saying, “I want to look like her.” I thought, Oh no you don’t!
Even at my sickest moments with cancer, when the pain and the utter exhaustion were unbearable, I had it in my head that if I moved, I would survive. As long as this body was still in motion, I would survive.
Every day I made sure I did something physical. There were days when all I could endure was to go from my apartment to the mailbox and back. Each step was agonising, firing hot shots of nausea up my throat. Rushes of fever would leave me lathered in sweat. I would finally fall back in the front door of my apartment, wallow in self-pity for a few minutes, then get on with life…because I still could. I was still moving.
Under the direction of my doctor, a brilliant guy who had been a bit of a Doogie Howser, I underwent the usual medical treatments associated with cancer. He had flown through school in record time and started university at fifteen or so. When I met Greg as my doctor prior to cancer, we had become friends. Instinctually this felt wrong, and no doubt professionally it was, but I loved his company. He was enormously charming. Although it was clear that I wasn’t quite getting the full picture, it didn’t worry me at the time. We had the best time together, going to major sporting events, dinners and shows at the expense of the drug companies that wanted Greg’s business.
In a short space of time, it became clear that the treatments I had been scheduled for weren’t working and the cancer was spreading. When Greg said, “We are going to try something new”, I never imagined my friend would put me at risk. He put me on an experimental drug, which I took for two days and then was bedridden for three weeks. Greg got a brand new sports car about a week after I went on this drug. Strangely coincidentally, it never cost me a cent to be on this drug.
After this I had had enough. I put a stop to it all.
I was grey, skeletal and completely bald, not an eyelash to my name. I felt utterly stripped and devoid. I couldn’t eat, though that didn’t seem to affect my ability to vomit. My stomach responded to filtered water as though it was curdled milk. The only relief I had at this time was when I closed my eyes; for some reason I felt cooler, safer, calmer. Everything else burned, ached and stung. The chemotherapy left my very veins feeling scraped and charred. You know that feeling you have, when you’ve spent all night next to a campfire and you can feel that grotty charred sensation in every pore? Well, that was what I felt like on the inside. Bizarrely, I had extraordinary insight into the internal trauma of my battle-raged body.
I refused treatment. The oncologist was peeved. He said, “At best, you’ve got two weeks.”
Two weeks to live. Two weeks. I was twenty years old.
I phoned my parents and told them I had cancer. This probably seems strange, but as I lived alone and some distance from them, I didn’t want them to worry; I just wanted to get on with the job of getting over this cancer. Actually, I didn’t tell many people about it because I couldn’t tolerate their pity. And I couldn’t help them in their distress; I just didn’t have the energy. They were so angry! But I just didn’t have it in me…I had to focus on surviving.
So I locked myself in my apartment with my cat, Rhubarb, and lay down awaiting death. Somewhere on the second day, I thought, “I don’t feel like I’m dying.” I wasn’t well. I felt like crap, my body was wasted away, simply breathing was painful…but I wasn’t dying. Perhaps that was more the core reason why I didn’t tell my family or many of my friends; I knew, within, that this would end and I would still be here. So I got up and got on with life.
I can’t explain it, and now I know that it actually doesn’t require explanation. The fact that I am still here is enough. My body healed itself.
Within a year I was cancer free.
But the damage was evident. My body was wasted down to its very base elements and felt truly foreign to me. I had no strength, restricted movement, little stamina and no appetite. Out walking one day, I tried to race a friend in a sprint up a hill. He laughed triumphantly when he got to the top and turned to find I had barely moved from where he left me. He joked, calling me “slack”and ‘slow”, but what he didn’t realise is that I had given it everything I had! There was just nothing there. This was a shattering revelation. My body had forgotten me! It was not unlike getting into a cab in a foreign country and finding the driver doesn’t speak English. We were going nowhere until I could communicate with this body again.
So the very first body I rehabilitated was my own, sculpted and rebuilt from the wastelands of terminal disease. It was hard work and felt agonisingly slow, but in reality, in a matter of months, I had discovered a body purpose-built for living.
I was still studying at university and was now paying my way through school by teaching aerobics classes (I had found a way to combine rehabilitation and earning). Leading sixteen to eighteen classes a week, my body was strong, muscular, capable and I loved the way it felt again! I was ready for a new challenge.
So I applied to enter the army. Of course, what else does a young girl do? I wanted to go in at general entry, as I admired the character at that level. Instead, with my evident education,