Cancer Made Me a Cold-Blooded Killer
Ever since childhood, I have been afraid of bugs. Ants, silverfish, beetles, spiders...my bug phobia includes them all. The act of squashing a bug has never been automatic for me - it takes minutes of "psyching" myself up to be able to do it, if at all. The sight of a cockroach (guaranteed when you visit Hawaii) has been known to paralyze me with fear. And with spiders I've always had an uneasy truce: I'll let them live (to eat more bugs) if they will just stay far out of my way.
For four decades, this is how it has been. Then, I started chemotherapy and I became a cold-blooded killer.
I can't explain it, but the change in behavior is dramatic and marked. Where I once was fearful and hesitant, now I am decisive and brutal. Overnight, I've changed and now I experience no hesitation to stomp on a wayward earwig or beetle. When a wasp makes its way into my bathroom, I whack it to death with a fly swatter. Kathy has seen me snatching gnats out of the air with my hand, squishing them with my fingers.
No way would I have ever done this before. That would have been gross. Now, though, it's like some bizarre kind of instinct.
Just yesterday, I watched as a spider ran across the kitchen counter, racing toward the edge, trying to get away from me. I could hear the Mission Impossible music playing in my head (doodle-ooo, doodle-ooo, doodle-ooo, duh-dun!) as he flung his body over the edge and rappelled down the front of the dishwasher by a strand of silk. He crash-landed at the bottom and was preparing to race off again, when I laughed and crushed him beneath my shoe.
Cold. Blooded. Killer.
Kathy says, "It is your own personal side effect." Let's see if it only lasts the length of chemo or this is the new Ruthless Me. In the meantime, if you have any friends who scurry on eight legs, fly while buzzing, have a shell-like body, or who are generally tiny and creepy; make sure they stay away from this house. There's a new sheriff in town.
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