One Year of Treatment, One Year of Hiking

I wanted to see if I could do it. It was the only thing that I had control of over the last fourteen months. I didn’t get to decide what was done to my body, but I could decide what I did with it. So I hiked. I hiked every single week from the moment I was discharged from my plastic surgeon, October 15, 2020, for fifty-two weeks straight. 104 hikes including two backpacking trips. 

It didn’t start off as the plan. The plan was to hike all twelve weeks of TH chemotherapy and to do some form of exercise five days a week for those twelve weeks. But when I got my last dose of Taxol I stopped working towards a specific goal, I just hiked as much as I could. One day in mid-August I was feeling tired and decided to see when the last time was that I took a week off from hiking. Come to find out, I had hiked every single week since October 2020. I hadn’t taken a week off from hiking since starting chemotherapy. I only had two more months of treatment left and I decided I was going to hike every week until my one year anniversary of being discharged from the surgeon. Today, October 11, 2021, I hiked my 104th hike, and have officially hiked 52 weeks straight. 

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I managed to hike through every single week of chemotherapy. I can’t believe that I did something that I’ve never done, even before cancer. In three days, I will receive my final dose of Herceptin, completing this phase of treatment, arguably the hardest fourteen months of my life. Twenty-six rounds of Herceptin, twenty rounds of radiation, twelve rounds of Taxol, and major surgery. A year of treatment. And when my original oncologist told me this was standard care, I laughed out loud. A year?! I wasn’t going to give up a year of my life, he was crazy. But guess what? I didn’t give up a year of my life. I lived. 

I experienced more life in the last year, while in treatment, than any other year of my life. I agreed to treatment so that I wouldn’t die yet. I did it because I didn’t have a choice. But I had a choice about what I did while getting poisoned. So I lived. I lived despite being anemic for a year. I did it despite being terrified constantly. I did it even when I was so weak and so tired and so scared and so sad and so afraid. I did it because I was alive. I’m alive.

52 weeks of cancer treatment, 104 hikes, 89 summits, 704 miles, 25 rounds of Herceptin, 12 rounds of Taxol, 20 rounds of radiation, and I’m alive. This is what it feels like to be alive.