Saturday, February 9, 2013

Ravens Win. Me, too.



On February 6th, two thousand now, N and I walked to the city-state and in we went. Normal. Monthly. My chemo menses, or whatever.

Well, no more.

I haven't posted or bored you with my daily hooey for a while. Rusty, out of practice, whatsoever it may be. I'll just cut to the chase. Which, for me, could take a while.

Oddly enough, with all the ups and downs and near death stuff and perfectly wonderful stretches, the Drs have managed to steer me across the calendar in just about the way they stated a long time ago.

Red line attached to a 1940's DC3 tracking across an old-style map. Except the map is a calendar, and my red line starts in April 2010 and arcs up over a bunch of horror and joy and fear and flat-out and 'holy shit did three months go by?' and 'is it still Tuesday the 8th?' and a whole bunch of other life, that tends to be life, and turns out, eventually, to be life.

And February 6, damn near when they originally said it would happen, I'm off the juice.

My maintenance chemo ended Wednesday. I got my last drip of Vincristine, which stays in the system for a few days. I am three of the five through my prednisone days, drinking water heavily and not-really-enjoying that everything tastes a little like is it 37% tupperware. After the 'roids and the Vinc toddle off like old men who just remembered they really wanted spaghetti, I'm done.

No more chemo.

I stay on the prophylaxis (tee hee) for about a month--let the immune system come back up with some protection, etc--and then we'll check with the heart Dr to see when I can get off the Gemfib, which has been keeping my cholesterol/triglycerides in line under the stress of chemo/roids and/or whatever evil the Asparagenase may or may not have wrought. Or, you know, all the steak.

Then, um, I'm kinda, well, normal. Ish.

Well, not really. When I go back in a month to get bloodwork and be done with the drugs, I'll get a nice yummy bone biopsy to stop me from thinking it's average-dude-days ahead. Then I will be on a three-month check-in schedule, with bone biopsies every other of those--so core samples every six months.

That lasts until I get to the five-year-from-remission mark. If I get there--if N walks me to the city-state sometime around spring of 2015 and whatever is still hanging off and within my frame is intact--then they call me 'cured.'

'Cured.'

That's fucking terrifying.

I've been terrified a lot lately. But not, you know, in a bad way.

You know those asinine sports stars--often in second-tier sports like hockey--who stop shaving in the playoffs, or spritz holy water on their gear, or whatever, to keep their luck running?

I'm doing that. But my spritz is terror, and silence on the topic of my chemo, or cancer, or leukemia, or stuff.

We're at the clinic, seeing faces I've been seeing for years now. Literally, years. Nurses and check-in people and Leon the insanely dapper blood-transporter from the Islands, doctors and bloodletters, and just, you know, humans.

And I'm silent. We get near a check-in desk, or a little bleeder table with an arm slab where I rest my flesh for the poke and check, or up to 10 Central to visit the our pharmacologist friend, or wherever.

And I'm silent. N keeps saying "Tell them." "Tell her." "Tell him."

And I'm glum and silent and terrified. You know that normal child who pulls back behind his parent's leg when people loom into his space. The child who doesn't do as he's told when it's "say hello to the Pastor," and "tell them how old you are," and "can you say where we went last night?" and "tell him your surprise about never being on chemo again, hopefully, ever. Ever."

I was never that kid. I was reciting George Carlin spot-on and singing Mazda commercial taglines and sifting seeds out of pot for the adults.

And now I'm silent and glum, and in my own head, and not sharing this absofuckinglutely fantastic news with the very people who have been endlessly a part of making it happen.

Short version: I'm being a dick.

But N is insistent, and knowledge pushes through, and by the time we're in front of the oncologist and the clinic staff, I'm kinda saying 'this is my last chemo' and stuff and realizing that, at the very least, I owe them this. And maybe I'm grinning a little. A little.

These people do this as a job. A job. This is their day. They lose people. When we met these Drs we knew two people in common with them: one was dead. Was already dead. Their faces fell when we said "oh, yeah, we knew X's family."

They lose people. I don't know the odds, but part of their job description reads "a bunch of the people you are supposed to save are gonna die. Try the dip."

So I need to wipe my snotty boy nose and maybe grow up a teensy bit, and start letting these people--and, ok, myself--know that I'm half a step over the threshold from 'in treatment' to 'recently pretty much out of treatment and now just paranoid as hell whenever I'm winded oh and also I get a corkscrew in my ass quarterly, but thing's are looking up.'

There. There it is.

Things are looking up.