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7/3/2009 3:33 AM

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I've forgotten what it feels like to feel well, to wake in the morning with energy for the day. I can no longer recall that feeling of excitement I had most summer mornings, those crisp early dawns when I put my bike on the back of the car and wiggled into my cycling pants and headed for the road.

I still can picture those mornings, and I know I was happy then, but the inner feeling of challenge and anticipation is lost to me now, plowed under with the cancer and the surgery and the chemotherapy.

I finished chemotherapy last week. When I walked out I felt a little lighter, knowing that with some luck I would never have to submit to that again. But even then, I knew the hard part was not yet over. There was still the recovery part, the six or seven days of climbing back out of the hole. Each of those six or seven days post-chemo is like a battle to be waged; I feel as if I'm crawling around with a piano on my back.

The doctors warned me that the effects of chemotherapy are cumulative. Last Sunday afternoon, while lying on the front porch, limp and pale as an overcooked noodle, I told my sister, "My body is trashed." And she said, "That's the point, isn't it?"

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The celebrity I now most resemble is Elmer Fudd. Without hair or eyelashes or brows and without enough red blood cells to color my cheeks or lips, I am an oatmeal-colored blob. I stopped looking at myself in the mirror weeks ago, when I sat down to apply some makeup and realized it was no use: the canvas is trashed.

This is the part of the column - two-thirds of the way through - where I should turn to the bright side. If there is a bright side, it's buried deep in the test results and body scans that are yet to come and will have the final word on whether all this sickness has been worth it. Nobody can tell me anything for sure right now, and so hope comes not from inside me but from outside. My kids hope they're going on a beach vacation later this summer. No, they don't hope it, they think it. And so I have to get better.

This has been hard for them. In six months I have deteriorated from a vital, energetic and busy (if somewhat irritating) mother to a ghost in flannel. The other day, my daughter was looking through some old photographs when she came across a picture of me holding her as a toddler. "I wish you still looked like that," she said, crying.

All my leaves have fallen off since then. Gone are the laugh and sense of humor and the quickness and the miles and miles on the bike. And yes, the long eyelashes. I long to be someone my kids recognize. Hell, I long to be someone I recognize.

The nurses said it will take a couple of months for my hair to come back. My doctor told me my body will reset itself after about six weeks, and that someday I'll wake up and feel like Beth again.

Whoever she is.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.

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