I have marathoned. Lunch was harder.
Yes, OK, that's dramatic and probably impossible to prove empirically, but it still feels that way.
This post was supposed to be about 'peg' Asparaginase, the form of chemo they are giving me for the specific kind of Leukemia I have. It was supposed to be about that because when they shorten it to 'peg' it is because the drug is being 'pegolated.' That means that they are wrapping the chemo in a fat cell, which causes it to take a lot longer to enter my system. So instead of L Asparaginase, which would have shot straight in, I get 'peg' Asparaginase, which creeps in like a cat coming for the baby's breath.
And that kind of stuff fascinates me. That kind of tech: wrapping my medicine in a fat cell to get it to dribble out more slowly. Who thinks of that stuff? Where do they do it? What kind of fat? Fascinating.
But not today. Today, as the river runs north and Stefan sleeps off his fully eaten--nay, gleefully eaten--meal, I am keeping lunch down by nothing more than sheer force of will and the knowledge of how much worse life would be if lunch returned.
Now it is real, and the buff and shine of last week's courage and cavalier poppycock are stripped off in what is, even to me--the sufferer--a hilariously short time.
Now I am sick. Sick and scared and trying not to hurl. That's the world: it got very small, very fast. I'll tell you, I'm not scared of cancer right now: I am scared of feeling like this for another ten minutes.
And it has just started.
I can enjoy it, somehow, set off to the side of my own involvement. Maybe there is something to the concept that the worst thing you can do to a person who thinks he is strong is to show him his weakness. I tell N that i feel like I could take a bullet, drag a friend over a mountain to safety, fight off brigands. but here it is, the evilest evil, the lowest low, and all it is is the blehs. A nuclear, unstoppable case of the blehs.
Observe the speed with which I went from demanding to be sent home to 'do it on our own' to being terrified they'll actually let me leave and I'll have to feel like this without a staff of 60 people milling about me.
A day and a half ago was another planet.
And it has just started.
Technically, this is the cure. The cliches that are annoyingly true at this point begin to come out. I am being made to feel this way by the medical establishment, the geniuses who figure out how to pegolate a friggin chemo drug into a fat cell. I understand and appreciate this, and it is of no comfort.
N wrote a story called 'Twang (Release)' in her first book that managed to take seasickness and actually describe it. Actually show you that what makes seasickness so bad is not the rolling or the pitch or the wallowing in time: it is simply that the sea has a greater will than your own. It's no question. You are defeated before you even start to fight. Beautiful, if horrifying.
That's where I am. Nothing hurts, per se. Nothing's wrong save some fatigue, some atrophy, the bruised narcissism of not having shaved one more time before my platelet levels go too low to do it safely.
But everything comes and goes through this opaque (Jim's great word for it) sheen, this wax-paper layer of horrible feeling. I could walk to the lounge; or I could hurl. I could lie here; or I could feel even sicker with my eyes closed.
And it is not an either/or scenario: no matter what you are doing, the feel-like-shit cloud is there, too.
I was shivering when I started lunch. I put on sweats. I don't know that it was chills: I think I was just really worried that lunch was going to be exactly as unpleasant as it turned out to be.
Hours have passed. I have eaten dinner. It was no better.
Not to say that the day was all like that. There are odd little moments where you slip out of the wretchedness, where all of a sudden you look up from between your fingers to realize that you may have actually not felt like crap for ten or fifteen minutes.
Mom and Jim were here for most of the day and it was great to see them. We met with the social worker and were put more at ease about how things might go in the near future.
The more important news came this morning, which seems like eleven weeks ago, when it sounded like Dr F and crew are looking to turf me home after Wednesday or Thursday. The exact schedule is not set--or if it is, it is not known to me--but it looks like another Spinal Tap tomorrow to check for brain juice as well as dump in more chemo, and then a full-tilt-boogie chemo session Wednesday, after which I would only need observation and testing until the following Wednesday. So maybe some type of come-and-go can happen.
Great. All well and good. Being home would, almost certainly, make me feel better.
Except that I feel so bad. Again, like seasickness, it is difficult to even grasp the logic of the planning, to see three days ahead of me, because I feel the way I do now.
It is fascinating, in those little moments when I feel OK enough to find it fascinating. Then the fascination wanes and I start to shiver. And it isn't the cold. It is the evil specter...of breakfast.
