Chemo and Killer Llamas

If there is one thing I love it is bad movies. The cheesier and lower budget, the better. Last weekend a friend and I hit the jackpot with a viewing of Llamageddon.

If you have not seen the 2015 cinematic masterpiece known as Llamageddon, allow me to share the IMDB-verified synopsis: “A killer llama from outer space crash lands on Earth and brings death and destruction to everyone in its path.”

Delightful. That is, if you find delight in nonsensical plotlines, camera operators visible in shots, shoddy special FX, and an extended sequence in which a human man is attacked and spit on by a space llama, and through this process starts to become a space llama himself.

It’s an insanely drawn out transformation spanning several scenes. Now he has a llama arm, now red eyes. Screaming! The acting isn’t exactly Oscar-worthy, but who’s to say screaming “fuck” over and over isn’t the correct way to respond when transitioning into a demon llama?

While I’m pretty positive chemo is not turning me into a llama from outer space, the feeling of my body being transformed from the inside out into something alien hits home.

Eight months ago, it felt like a foreign creature was using my body as a host. Before we knew to call it "cancer", my friends and I felt the need to call it "Baby Liz" to differentiate between the me that is me, and the me that was it. In the hospital I kept picturing the chest-burster scene from Alien, certain it was only a matter of time before Baby Liz decided to jump out of me.

Then chemo started and the real transformation into something other began.

Like the llama in the movie, I gained the power of radioactive spit — for the first few days after each chemo cycle, anyway. (Urine, too, and what a useless superpower radioactive pee is, by the way: "Watch out for Urine Trouble, with the power to pee on her enemies. Don't piss her off!")

Instead of growing fur all over, I lost all of my hair.

My feet fall asleep so often they may as well be hooves for how clunky and detached they've become.

Then I had The Big Surgery, an even more aggressive butchering of my body that maybe did belong in a cheesy slasher film.

I have a giant Frankenstein(-’s monster, YES I KNOW) scar marking exactly where they sliced me open and took out some seemingly important organs. (To my knowledge, they did not replace them with llama organs.)

I don’t have heat laser eyes, but I do get hot flashes that make my whole head feel like it’s on fire for a few minutes at a time. (I usually get a craving for ice cream when this happens. It doesn’t actually fix the Ghost Rider situation but I'm a firm believer anything is more tolerable with ice cream.)

My body is still adjusting to the sudden change in hormone levels and hasn't quite figured out how to react now to my pain meds or antidepressants, to say nothing about how it continues to react to rounds 4-6 of chemo.

I am not unrecognizable in this new body — I can still see myself when I look in the mirror, even if I have to look a bit closer. But I can also see what’s lost. And it’s more than just the hair or the eyebrows, or even the organs.

It's more than I want to write about in a blog right now.

Hopefully soon, the cancer will be lost along with the rest of it. Until then, I'll be doing some target practice with my radioactive llama spit.