LIFE, WITH CANCER
Feeling on top of everything, briefly
Lauren Terrazzano
Life, With Cancer
March 20, 2007
Like many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a 50-degree day, the sun was shining and I woke up and felt like going for a hike, something I loved to do long before cancer.
Upstate Bear Mountain was no big deal for a girl who had once spent nearly a week hiking in the Canadian Rockies, sleeping in alpine huts. Or who had once climbed the Grand Tetons with a group of rabid female journalists.
But I had two lungs during those treks. Now I have one.
So we set off that Sunday morning a week ago: my husband, my trusted friend and I, up the Palisades Parkway to the trailhead. There were few hikers making the ascent; most people gathered there were heading indoors for the carousel at the base of the mountain.
I need to get to the top of this mountain, I told myself and my two compadres.
I needed to feel alive. There's nothing like climbing a mountain to do that. Even if it's only a 4-mile climb that wends its way through the famed Appalachian Trail.
In the old days it would take me 90 minutes to get to the peak, which rewards hikers with an observation tower and magnificent views of the Bear Mountain Bridge and the Hudson River. Bear Mountain, incidentally, has few bears. It is named because the mountain is said to resemble a sleeping one.
"There must be a column in this somewhere," my friend Monica suggested as we clambered along the icy trail, holding onto trees and hiking sticks so we wouldn't butt-slide down the steep mountain path.
As we climbed I remembered getting up there once, picnic lunch in hand, and seeing the tops of the Twin Towers off in the distance. That was just a few days before Sept. 11, 2001.
In 2005, 10 months after my first surgery, to remove the lung, I somehow managed to get 40 wonderful reporter friends (not a small feat, since we aren't the most athletic bunch) and their families to climb the mountain as a fundraiser for underinsured lung cancer patients. We celebrated at the summit with catered sandwiches and chocolate cookies.
The climb on this March day was a little different. It was icy on most of the trail, and nippy in the areas shaded by the tall evergreens. Whenever I got tired, my husband would grab my arm and pull me up the path. Monica offered plentiful words of encouragement while carrying my pack, all the while threatening to kill me for putting myself in such a precarious situation.
In a sweep of melodrama, I sat on a dry log and told them to go on without me. Perhaps the illness simply has taken its toll. But more than two hours later, we did, in fact, make it to the top. The icy, cold top. Victory. There was no one else up there.
A few days later, my white blood cells plummeted, an occasional side effect of cancer treatment. Perhaps the exertion of the hike didn't help. I was contemplating not writing a column this week.
But as I write this, I am bored, sitting in a hospital bed listening to the rhythmic sound of an IV pump as it transports fluids and antibiotics through my veins. Silly me.
That's the thing about cancer. There are a lot of peaks and valleys. One minute you're on the top of the mountain, the next minute you're at the base of the trail again.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
