50's sickly appearance for his next role as a cancer patient

Looking at pictures of 50 Cent’s dramatic weight loss takes me back to 2008, the year I had my surgery and started chemo. It sure wasn’t pretty, but more on that in a moment.
 
50 dropped 60 pounds — reportedly by adopting a liquid diet and walking on a treadmill for three hours a day — for his latest role as a football player who becomes a cancer patient.

His photos are shocking. His face is gaunt, and his eyes seem disturbingly empty. It got me wondering if that’s what folks thought about me when I dropped 30 pounds at the start of my cancer experience.

I only have a few pictures of myself at 120 pounds, and I can’t look at them without cringing. My collarbone is protruding, and my eyes look sunken in. I underwent rapid weight loss, which, as you can tell from the photo, is pretty unforgiving.

When I smiled, I felt really self-conscious about showing my teeth because my pearly whites turned dull, and I looked like I was a few vitamins short of dysentery. Perhaps worst of all, though, I lost my hips and thighs, which, for a black woman, is the equivalent of losing your most prized assets.

I cried when I couldn’t fill out a pair of size 4 jeans. I remember being around my girls, who are all nice and thick, and thinking about how unattractive I looked. When surrounded by their voluptuous bodies, I felt like Star Jones. And that gave me a whole new appreciation for curves and a little body fat.

It took me about a year before I began to feel and look like my normal self. When I ditched my first round of chemo cocktails for Avastin, the drug I’m on now, I no longer had a constant medicine taste in my mouth. And when my appetite returned, I decided to eat whatever I wanted, and it worked.
 
I started busting out my cancer clothes with the quickness, and I said many Hail Mary’s when my butt returned. When some random dude on the street complimented me on my curvaceousness, I got really excited. He had no idea how much he’d made my day. I felt like I was back after a very unattractive 12 months.

So, I write all this in the hope that 50′s new movie, which I’m going to see even though I heard it’s “good and terrible,” shows him rebound from his sickly appearance. Clearly, my own metamorphosis from Skeletor to thick girl is proof that it’s possible to bounce back from cancer-causing weight loss.

In fact, when I go to the hospital for treatment, I see very few cancer patients who look like cancer patients. You’d never even know that most of them were on chemo. That makes me thankful to live in the time of modern medicine, which is probably really rudimentary in the grand scheme of it all. Nevertheless, we’ve come a long way from the images of that frail, near-death dude in the Julia Roberts’ movie Dying Young.

Recently, one of the nurses in the chemo unit told me that I was pretty healthy. You know, uhm, cancer aside. It sounds like an oxymoron, but luckily in the 21st century, it doesn’t have to be.

I hope 50′s new flick represents us right.

Since I started my cancer crusade, I’ve been supported by a legion of caretakers — friends and family — who have helped this Slayer gyrl come back strong. I still have a long way to go, but the road to recovery is best traveled with a crew, and I have one of the dopest around.   

Case in point: My diagnosis, surgery, and chemo were a pretty crappy series of events. It’s like someone threw in all the ingredients of the worst things that can happen in life and served them to me straight up.  

A few days before my surgery, though, I’m at home, belly distended with about nine liters of fluid called acites, which  often forms around ovarian tumors. It was uncomfortable and, literally, killing me, but I wasn’t so much nervous about the events that were about to unfold as I was eager to get the damn surgery over and done with. As I was sitting around trying to get my mind right, who decides to come sauntering through my door at 9 p.m. from more than 3,000 miles away? My road dog and favorite cousin, ArtistCalida.  

a joint birthday celebration for the garcia gyrls

Now, Calida and I have been like hotdogs and applesauce since the beginning. Our dads are brothers, and we were born only two days apart. We lived around the corner from each other our entire childhoods, left our homes in Wilmington, Del., to go to different HBCUs, and then regrouped like long-lost twins in New York City, where we lived together (and got robbed, but that’s another story).  

After spending our twenties living it up in NYC, Calida made her way to the West Coast, where she now has a family of her own. So when she showed up at my apartment in Brooklyn in June of 2008, I was surprised to see her. But then again, it made all the sense in the world. With my cancer run-in, our twin energy was off, and Lida had to come back to restore it.  

So, fast-forward to a new and healthier me (y’all get the blog updates), and now I get to cheer from the sidelines. Lida just finished her first children’s book, Same Difference, which is a beautifully illustrated story about black hair, diversity, and two precocious little cousins who act more like twins. Sounds awfully familiar.  

joint toilet time -- one of the book's illustrations

Same Difference, which was published last month, has already gotten glowing reviews by Essence, and my cuz is doing  readings and visiting classrooms in Los Angeles to talk about her work. The book is less about me (and another one of our cousins who got morphed into the same character) and more about celebrating the beauty of diversity. Either way, I’m glad to have been along for the journey and to see the story of our sweet-as-pie childhood come to life in vivid colors and detail.     

Most of all, though, I’m feeling pretty proud to have served as one-half of my cousin’s inspiration, especially since she has often been the source of mine — like the night I shed my cancer cocoon and emerged a Cancer Slayer.  

When I first opened my eyes post-surgery, Lida was at my bedside. And when my doctors forced me to get up and walk around the very same day, she held my robe closed so I wouldn’t moon the hospital visitors who passed us by.   

She made me laugh even though I had staples in my stomach and helped me sneak sips of water when the doctors told me I could only have ice chips.   

There’s nothing like having a cousin there to help you bend the rules. And that’s how it’s been since we were little enough to share the same toilet seat — which really did happen.   

The two comedians were discussing health care, when Rock recalled visiting the hospital with his dad back in the day, and then more recently with his mom. At 22, Rock said, he was broke and not in a position to financially help his sick father. Consequently, his dad went to a third-rate hospital for a ruptured ulcer and died days later.

Fast-forward almost two decades, and a much richer Rock stops by to see his mom only to wonder if he stumbled upon a hotel rather than a hospital. There was a “concierge in the lobby,” Rock quipped, before noting “if the average person knew the discrepancies in health care, there would be riots in the street.”

He ain’t lying. When you get a taste of what good health insurance can get you, you realize how much of an advantage the have-mores actually have.

For the last two years, I’ve been being treated at one of the best cancer centers in the country, and I’m still shocked at the level of care. Like Chris Rock said, it’s like getting an upgrade to first class.

Last week, for example, I had an appointment with my chemotherapist. We talked about the results from my latest blood test, which had spiked in recent weeks but then subsided. I told her it was likely caused by stress, and she suggested that I talk to a shrink.

“This can be a lot to deal with,” she said. Maybe she was right, I thought. So I agreed to talk to a therapist on the spot.

An hour later, I’m getting my juice in the chemo suite when the phone rings. And guess who’s on the other end? That’s right, the therapist’s office.

In the 60 or so minutes that it took for me to see my doctor and then wait for my meds to get mixed in the pharmacy, my doctor told her assistant to contact the therapist’s assistant, who contact me. And there I was on the phone, with calendar in hand, coordinating schedules.

The kind voice on the other end told me that my doctor was worried about me and that she wanted me to talk to someone who could help. Talk about thorough. I felt like I was in that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and crew are getting pampered before going to see the Wizard. Remember all the dedicated attendants? Several were curling the Lion’s hair, while others were combing Toto’s fur. And still others were buffing the Tin Man’s armor? It was like an assembly line of excellent service.

That’s what the right coverage can offer: a close network of people providing first-rate care. It sure is a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately, though, so many middle- and working-class Americans will never know what that’s like. If they could just get a taste, it would change they way they view health care forever.

And this access, or lack of, is what’s so perplexing about the Tea Partiers. Many of them are among the 38 million uninsured and underinsured in this country, but they are the most anti-health-care-reform people around.

And all they have to do is look inward to see the health care contradiction at its most absurd. The lawmakers that the Tea Partiers support have the kind of insurance that gives them access to top-tier treatment centers like mine. The voters who got them elected, however, don’t fare so well.

For the life of me, I can’t comprehend their reasoning or their anger. They were rioting in the streets all right. Only they didn’t know they were mad about the wrong damn thing.