Brief back-story--since last week's LIVE! DIRECT FROM HELL! THIS IS SPINAL TAP! I have had the lower-level Tap headache. It went away sometimes, especially when I was lying down, but not totally, and always came back.
I woke up this morning, admittedly dreading going in for more chemo and yet another Tap--the 4th in six weeks, I think. During the second-to-last wake-up-to-use-the-can event (my nights are divided by three-hour or so awakenings to maintain fluid equilibrium, as it were) I noticed that the headache had come back, even though I had spent the previous six hours on my back. Not a bad headache, but a headache.
So I was of a mind to cancel the Tap for the day if possible, maybe postpone till tomorrow like last week, or something.
I was also very in my own head and in my own way, getting so worked up about the impending trip to the hospital that I couldn't finish my oatmeal. For those of you who know me--especially if you have known me since I was a kid--you know that anything bad enough to keep me off my Quakers is bad indeed. Pouring the Maple Brown Sugar goodness into the toilet--because all true oatmeal-ists know the sink is no place to dump it when you have more than a little left over--I started feeling sick, and it was dread, not nausea.
A note to people going through bad things: GET THE HELL OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY. If this illness has taught me anything it is that there aren't many things more damaging and dangerous to my health than chemo, but that I am one of them. My capacity to get and stay in my head can exacerbate situations way out of any normal range.
The scariest moment I have had--shorter-lived but painfully more unnerving than A-fib--was my just-home freakout of a week ago or so. Totally internal. NO physical truths on which to have based it. NO real crisis. And yet I was soaring on an adrenal tsunami of my own making and spiraling like a barnstormer with shattered ailerons. FOR NO REASON.
If you have the time to learn a new skill you hope to use in times of trouble, it should be How To Talk Yourself Down.
OK, lesson over. Sorry.
So I leave the apartment this morning on the wings of a lesser but not insignificant head trip. But Mom and Jim are driving me, giving N a day of rest she greatly deserves for shepherding me through so much for so long. Part of what keeps me even a little chill is the thought that she's asleep, getting rest, recharging her batteries.
We get to the hospital and I check in, get bled, and go to see the Nurse Practitioner under the lead Dr. She writes up a piece of prescription to the Tap people upstairs mandating that hey don't take ANY FRIGGING fluid from me: only put chemo in. The headaches are possibly caused by too much coming out over the weeks.
Also, the bloods show I am a little anemic, which may also explain the headaches and negative feelings. So I will get a unit of blood with my IV chemo after the Tap.
Then I got to the IR Tap people, send Mom and Jim off for the two hours it always takes, get dressed in the goddamn gown.
31 days in-patient and I never wore the gown, never had to wear anything other than my own heavy metal t-shirts and gym shorts; but NO! In IR for your Tap you have to wear the ass-is-out gown, and the engineers'-cap-striped robe, and the show-everyone-your-willy scrubs, and the don't-fall-you-frail-sick-dipshit socks with little rubberized treads on them. Good times. Good times.
OK, in to meet the guy who will Tap me. He and the nurse are dismissive of the theory that ANYTHING their department did could cause the headaches, and dismissive of the possibility that something as regular as taking extra fluid for cytology and tests could be bad. Dismissive, in fact, of anything not deriving from...how to say...them.
But they respect the prescription from the NP, and they respect the fear on my face. So they will not take any fluid, and the Tapper will check to see where they Tapped me last week and will actively avoid that area--I had told him of my fear (GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY!) that there was a section of my spinal column that now looked like a wiffle-ball from all the taps.
Careful what you wish for.
I go in, get laid out on the tech-geek moving table. I get swabbed, numbed, prepped, and x-rayed for needle location. All is going well.
Careful what you wish for.
He starts the needle. I feel very little--he's good, has numbed me well and has a light touch.
Careful what you wish for.
I have learned how their hands move, so I know that these small light touch-and-remove motions are him slowly placing the needle deeper and closer to the column before the slightly stronger push needed to pop through. You know, the horrible moment.
Careful what you--
HOLY SHIT WHAT WAS THAT?!?!?! ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZING!
The only way I can describe what happened next is that in the time it takes a good day to turn bad or an idea to turn out to be bad, some evil sprite has attached jumper cables to my left hamstring and clicked them onto the terminals of a fresh 12 volt source. From the base of my spine to the bottom of my left foot lights up and crackles. I actually thought I heard crackles (I did not).
I, amazing to myself, do not leap up and run away with a needle sticking out of my back. I tense, I inhale rather abruptly, and I begin nattering on with
What was that?!" and "What just happened?!" in what I can only assume is a barely-controlled yell.
The Dr, who didn't hear crackling and didn't feel like his ass and his heel sent each other messages via white-hot wires, stops and asks me what I felt. I babbble, but seem to get the message across.
He says it is transient, and he's right. It ended before my terror even finished blooming. He tells me it happens some of the time.
"Oh, I must've hit a nerve root."
"A what. What's that?"
"Its a...how 'bout we finish and then I'll explain?"
"...OK."
The spinal cord ends about 5 Lumbar from the base of your spine. Dangling in what I can only imagine is a gloriously beautiful way from the bottom of your spinal column is the Cauda Equina. This is Latin for Horse's Tail, and it is a swishing and swaying cascade of nearly invisible nerve roots that extend down along the rest of the column and allow nerve info to travel to the lower half of the body.
In needling me higher to avoid my wiffle-ball fears, he went into an area more likely than below to poke a nerve root.
And he did.
Be careful what you wish for. GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY.
Most of the time the needle slides past a nerve root, but sometimes, when genius patients make suggestions, you get to where a needle just jabs a beautiful raw nerve minding it's own tendrilous business and floating in the fluid of your sensation.
And then, pow; sonofabitch, you are awake. Awake like you have never been.
As they lowered me back to flat, it popped one more time--a slightly shorter blast that only went through my thigh but was equally alive and devilishly magical--and then it was all over and I had chemo in and no fluid out and it was off to lie on my back for an hour.
And then I went back to the land of the living and got a bag of blood and my IV chemo and was home for to see N for dinner--beef teriyaki and my numbers are good enough for Medium, though still, sad sad sad, not Medium-rare.
One more down, another lesson learned. And after all that, I feel OK, and the headache is lurking, but farther back, deeper down. Success, progress, more giddy medical hi-jinx to check off the list.
