I think, for the most part, I'm gonna let that picture speak for itself.
But for the record? That gray-white shit on the left side of the flaming red hell-loogie that used to be my uvula? That's not discarded paper towel, or aging Trident Plain Sugarless chewing gum, or a snail trapped by the camera out of it's shell and feeding on the inflamed magma that was my mouth.
Nope, that is just some other form of me. Pustulent. Scabrous. Booger-y. Something.
On Thursday we were admitted to the ER. It is Thursday again now.
For a week I have been swallowing through that glorious pain storm you see there.
Good times. Good times.
But good thing I was in the hospital, huh? Otherwise I would have been just, you know, lying around, not eating much of anything, feeling like garbage, and not really getting better.
Wait a minute...
That's what I...
...oh hell.
[Ed: at this point I would like to point out that the spellcheck on the iPad, while capitalizing the P that makes the product name correct, also changes 'hell' to 'He'll' every time you try and type it. I find this to be one of the most sickening and creeping forms of censorship, and so would now like to type "God and Mohammed blood-farting on the dove of peace while Yaweh beats a harp seal pup to death with a Torah" just to prove how fucking idiotic built-in thought control attempts really are. Everyone feel better? I sure as shit do.]
Sorry, where was I?
Oh, right. Hell.
I've been in here a while now. Tony Chevelle and the selfish carcass he married and wrapped in a fur coat have long since gone, and our very good nurse for the middle three nights got us moved to their window bed. That was by far the best event of the week.
Two other positives: our replacement roommate is a nice Chinese man with very little English, who watches tv quietly on his laptop.
And, if you can force yourself to look at the above pic again, you'll see hair. Hair all over the place. Lots of it gray or white, but don't give a rat's ass. It's hair.
OK, back to hell.
The pain got to be rally bad. Each swallow is precursored by me tensing up, bulling out my beck muscles, and making this defeated face because I know what's coming and that I can't do anything about it. Then I freeze that way, holding off the inevitable for a couple glorious seconds. Like in the movies where they have been moving in real-time until the guy lays his neck in the curved and stained wood of the guillotine receiver. Then time slows down, milks the last good moments. Milks the incoming horror.
Then I swallow, and my whole upper body convulses, my fists twitching, balled at the sides of my chest. I escape from the closed-mouth violence with a burst of a semi-word, something between 'argh,' 'ow!,' and 'fuck!' My neck sort of snaps to one side or the other, trying to shake off how wrong that just felt.
And then the saliva starts to build, and the cycle reloads.
Magic Mouthwash, the universal gargle in this place that has Lidocaine in it, doesn't help more than a little. Viscous Lidocain solution, 2% of the stuff in a little shot cup and slippery like snot, is mildly better but not by much. This shit called Sucralfate suspension, which is...I don't have the slightest what it is but it is pink and tastes gritty, does a mildly better job than the other two. But all of this relief is like saying 'my whole leg is on fire but when you blow on my toes I guess that's better.'
I look like the worst kind of orderly junkie, with fully a dozen holes across the undersides of both arms, certain Magellanic clouds of punctures wrapped in their own individual bruises.
The Drs finally talk me into narcotics, as you know one of my favorite fucking topics. Not a single flicker of medical improvement offered, just plain old cop-out in convenient syringe doses.
But they convince me that if the pain is less I can swallow more, and I can rest more, and that will help me get better.
The first shot they give me is 1mg of morphine, and the nurse pushes it kinda quick, and so I get that wash-over-you roll that I assume Keith Richards really digs, but just makes me infinitely sad, like watching quicksand take a puppy that is squealing and squealing.
But the pain subsides for an hour or so, and I relax a little. I'm depressed, but I am not tensed against the coming swallow.
The next shot is 1mg again, but when the Drs find out about that they get kinda mad, because apparently that's the dose they give babies.
So the third shot is 4mgs. It is pushed slowly so I do not drown in the wash, but it's a lot of morphine. And I don't feel that much relief. Some, sure, but not four times the previous hit.
After that they realize it might be best to get me attached to a PCA pump, which allows for self-administered doses of Dilauded. Each button-push doses .2mg. And since it is still IV it gets to me pretty quickly. This seems like the best way to allow me to get through a night. By now I have been here four nights or so, and have developed the pain-dance each evening where I will barely get to sleep and then will be awakened by the kick-to-the-sleeping-nuts of swallowing while unconscious, and that yanking from slumber and attendant pain makes sleeping again really tough. I find I am making these astonished faces at the ceiling when I swallow awake or cough. I am amazed at the pain and sending this shocked face of wide-eyed agony towards the fluorescent lights.
So now I can push the button, and slip quickly to sleep in the fifteen minutes where I feel a mild numbing. Then when I cough or swallow awake I just push the button again. Repeat.
It gets me through the night.
And it brings my father's death right up next to me in th bed. And it breaks my heart, and almost my spirit.
I don't know if anyone else saw this coming. It may be a collection of images only I have.
But when dad was dying, there were a couple visuals that really seared into me. One was this look of childlike astonishment at certain unpleasant sensations. He had lost most of himself by this point, the steel mind and furiously enforced calm, the thinking and thinking and caring. Most of it had been eaten by then. His leg muscles had turned to bags of lentils, he would stand into my arms by his hospice bed in the home he and his wife shared, and he would take a few steps with me. But only because some vestige of him wanted to please me, knew I was somehow a familiar presence whose arms were out. He would stand, restless in his lostness, and we would waltz an ungainly and love-shredded two or three steps before he would falter, look up at me with a blank face, and begin to sag towards the bed again. I lost him twenty times that way in the last three days before I lost him. I am sure his wife went through the same thing, or something else pure and tourniquet close for her.
And on the way to lying down again, at a particular moment when his head would push at the raging tumor in his esophagus, or when his legs would not be able to take the weight any more, he would blast this innocent face of perturbed discomfort out at the sky, or the ceiling. This bright flash of 'Something's really unpleasant!' just for a second. Then it would pass.
And for the pain--to blanket those last days in as much comfort as possible, to deny the rotting body it's last whips of pain--he was on a narcotic pump. I don't rememberer if it was morphine, or Dilauded, or something else. And it was embedded right into him, without a needle, because he wasn't coming back. But it was the same brown as mine, and the same size. And made the same noise.
The last joke he played on me, from the grave, was with that pump.
He had died a little earlier that night, and I was alone with the body, having been allowed a few minutes to get him ready for the coroner or undertaker or whoever. I was leaning over his body, getting him laid out and presentable. He'd been dead for at least twenty minutes by now. I had my face about three inches from his chin.
And he whirred.
The following seven seconds will be the most emotionally charged and busy I will ever experience. I shot up, cursing and stopping myself from cursing at the same time. Terror swept through me parallel to the knowledge that he wasn't there, terror that we had said goodbye and abandoned him when he wasn't gone overlapping perfectly with the knowledge that he was not there. Then as I realized it was the battery-timed drug pump filling a corpse with pointless doses, I collapsed with relief at the same instant that I started to find it hilarious, at the same moment that I knew dad had never liked drug humor that much, at the same moment that I thought he would have found what just happened absofuckinglutely hilarious, at the same momentthats I knew he would never know that it had happened, at the same moment that I wished, wished, oh how I wished that he would. It was the last moment we shared, and the first moment we didn't.
And now, here I am, alone in a mechanical bed, eyes popping with an innocent's astonishment at how much it hurts, how wrong it is. With this brown plastic pump murmuring it's whirring drug-song to me in the dark.
It doesn't make me fear dying. I know what cancer took dad and how, and my reaper cannot fucking have me yet.
But god it's lonely. And so, so sad.
N right next to me or a million miles away. Family, friends. Doesn't matter. This moment is another kind of mime box; a Harry Potter cape. It's just us in here; me and Mr. Death, Mr. Memory.
Watching the boats go by has helped. I had forgotten, both the extent to which American cities have turned their backs on their waterways, and just how many positive receptors can be touched by watching tugs and tankers and cutters push their noses into the massed power that is a river. N starts 'oohing!' and I shuffle off the mechanical bull, dragging tubes and poles and whirring pumps, and clamber over to her spot by the window, and she points, and there's silence, and I say something like 'that one's loaded down! Look at how low in water she lies.'
And life stings a little less. Time grows a little shorter.
Partially because of the drugs and Drs and stuff, but, honestly, mostly just because time fucking passed, my white count finally left the floor, peaking at 5.4 yesterday and settling back into the high threes today. I got another bag of platelets and my hemoglobin is above 10 today, and it looks like they intend to send me home tomorrow, a week and a day after we stumbled in here, hobbled and scraped empty by medical myopia.
We'll get a bit of a break before they start the chemo again and look for the balance that should be maintenance. And this time we're more than ready to be hard-ass about taking it slow, finding the dose carefully, and doing it right.
My exercise and racing schedule has been pushed back quite a bit, and I have to just accept that and rewrite my hope list again. No problem. Our travel and comfort and OK-to-be-alone schedule has been origamied once again as well. No problem, we'll look at it all anew and figure it out. Where I thought I would be starting to see old musculature returning and where I thought I would be in double-digit run distances, I see atrophy from last month's gains and four mile runs as goals.
Fine. Keep throwing shit on me, because shit is fertilizer, and I am just growing stronger.
And I don't smell so hot.
Gimme some room; I'm gettin' up.
