So this new chemo is something of an ass-kicker. And now that we are home, the sense of myself as a medical dumping-ground has grown. The pills at the altar above are, save one, just secondary drugs--prophylactics (tee hee), side-effect counters, heart regulators-- and not the real chemo. One chemo is in pill form, the rest are IV to the vein or spine and done in hospital.
And there are new challenges.
Either the number of LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP1s has caught up with me, or because the fancy pants super-official boys-and-their-toys Radiology Geeks did a crappier job than the harried, do-it-by-hand female PA's upstairs of tapping my spine; I am not sure which, but now I have Tap Headache #2.
There are two Tap Headache options:
1--Skull-splitting agony immediately after Tap. Patient is likely to request a bullet to the brain as aspirin. Feared universally: why they make you lie down for an hour after a Tap.
2--Low-level, never-far-away, light-sensitive headache that slides from temple to temple like the eye-lights on Cylon Warriors and the Knight Industries Two Thousand. This headache is not permanent: it only hits when you are Not Lying On Your Back. And it has only lasted Three Days.
Granted, I think I prefer the #2 I have to a #1, but it has still made the concept of a few days recovery less likely.
It has also made keeping up with email and blogging a pain, as I tend to be both staring at a bright light and Not Lying On My Back when I am on the computer. Right now my head is as far down the arm of the couch as my head can be without losing sight of the laptop, and I am still dancing in a twilight of head pain and temple-tension.
On the upside, this round has kept me closer to myself. There is no pred or steroid of any kind. While that means that I do not have the jazzed and junked hormones that were a buffer to the brutality of the last chemo, I am rarely if ever in doubt of who is at the wheel in my head, and that is worth a great deal to me, and to N. There are still hours when something like a pred stalactite ('stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, stalagmites might get there!') breaks off and swirls into my system and I jittery and hungry and easily riled, but for the most part I am me again, for better or worse.
And the side-effects (I have yet to find a reason for them to be on the side: they seemed like everywhere-effects to me) this time around are more purely physical: head pain, nausea, straight-up fatigue. I pretty much slept through Sunday: how was it?
I have not seen the grey come roiling at me like the oil plumes that BP's greed-whore planet-raping scumbag corporate murderers unleashed on us because one more fail-safe cost too much. I have not felt the grey creep up on me.
I have been me. Hurt, beat, tired, sick. But me. And that's good. I'd rather be me, home, in a tough spot, than some queasy greasy reflection of something mildly resembling me railing against another sleepless night on the ward. Any day.
And the chemo and protocol seem more beatable when they are just attacking your body, and not your sense of self. I remember how hard the battle was with the Red Devil.
The Red Devil, literally, broke my heart. That's a lot to take.
But you know what, you little Red sack of shit? My heart is strong. My heart is so much more than the 100,000 or so (yes I did the math) cracked beats it gave you over those wretched 28 hours. My heart has history, and N, and a future we are fighting for. Fighting through the grey last time and the pain this time. And if you think a little A-fib, a seething skull, and the desire to hurl for a week straight are enough to stop me wanting to get past this, get past you, get goddamn better, then, to quote my leather-clad Metal God talisman, "You got another thing comin'"
Phase one was a nightmare, and Phase two is looking to be a pretty tall glass of crap, too. But the body endures, the mind erases, the night comes, and the dawn has just enough birdsong, even in this city, to make you happy you woke up. Every friggin' day, to start feeling like shit again. Because every day is one day less in the trenches. Every day is one more day when you allow the poisons to get in there as deep and as burrowed as they can and smoke that cancer out if its hole, to use the words of our dumbest president to better purpose.
Every day is a day you ain't dead, a day you are getting better by feeling worse, a day farther along on the blue line on the Google-map between Here and Cured.
So Phase two has its charms, as it were. And N is learning them, and I am learning them, and we will get them figured out. And then they'll be behind us.
Left foot Right foot. Repeat.
