How Exercise Helped Me Get Through Leukemia Treatment

As a baby, I must have found my crib boring. I tried to climb out of it as though it was my personal jungle gym. My parents put extensions on to keep me in. I obviously grew out of the crib, but the will to keep moving stayed with me. When I was bike-riding age, I sped along and said, "Look Ma, no hands!" before the other kids did.

Years later, a parent myself, I went for a run while my parents watched my three kids. I tripped on some loose pavement and came down hard on my shoulder. It was in front of a house where my parents’ friends lived. They cleaned me up and offered a ride, but I needed to finish the run because that’s what you did.

Unusually exhausted after exercise

In March of 2003, I struggled to finish a 6.2-mile race, and my time was 10 minutes slower than the year before in the Saint Patrick's Road Race in Holyoke, Mass. I called my doctor. I thought it was just anemia, but it turned out to be that as well as a drop in platelets and white blood cells.

I had acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, an aggressive blood cancer. Within a matter of weeks, I was hospitalized at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Want to keep moving

One of my first questions for my nurse was in character:

“Where do patients exercise?”

"On the Pike," she said.

Since the Massachusetts Turnpike was nearby, I thought that’s what she meant. But surely she didn’t want me to play in traffic! I soon learned it was a long corridor, on the second floor of Brigham and Women's Hospital, where offices are marked by Turnpike-like exit signs.

While receiving chemotherapy leading up to a stem cell transplant, I was hospitalized for weeks at a time on the upper floors where Dana-Farber had its beds. Many’s the day that high fevers, mouth sores and a range of chemo aftereffects kept me curled up in bed.

Exercising on better days

But for when there were better days, I got an exercise bike in my room. Or I might go walk on the Pike with my mom or my sister. I would drag my IV pole from one end to the other, stopping to do runners’ stretches or run into the bathroom. Either way, I felt more like an athlete than a patient.

When we went to see "the wig lady," a long walk to a different part of the hospital, my mom and my sister and I piled purses in the wheelchair. We laughed about the wheelchair transporting everything BUT the patient.

If I felt queasy, Mom could make me forget it by asking, “Do you want to get a Coke and go to The Riviera?”

Who wouldn’t exchange Boston, Mass., for The Riviera, even if they didn’t look their best? Actually it was a sunny hospital side entrance decorated with flowers and potted trees. We each sat in a wheelchair and watched the cars and people come and go. (I didn’t mind using the wheelchair as a chair. I just didn’t want it for transportation.)

Exploring and finding hope

One day, a friend who was visiting played the role of waitress. She took our orders. I assume it was another Coke. This distracted me from the “what ifs” that could crowd my mind.

We also discovered the Bridge of Hope, a third-floor corridor decorated with soaring birds carrying medicinal herbs. The murals were inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem, “Hope is the Thing With Feathers,” painted on a part of the wall. I would stop and read the poem that begins,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words

Writing about it on my blog some 10 years later, I recalled how peaceful it was.

It became part of my healing, and if I hadn’t gone exploring, I wouldn’t have seen any of it. Of course, anyone who is blessed with the will to forge ahead knows the flip side. That’s the tendency to want to go all out without regard for limitations. The challenge is finding the happy medium, the sweet spot. It’s a work in progress.