Turns out there can be too much of a good thing, and so I am on pee restriction. Or rather, to be more correct, water restriction and pee counting. Or something.
I have a friend on my running team. She's a strong runner, keeps insane weekly mileage, takes care of herself, the whole nine. Athlete. Last year she runs a long race--the friggin Boston Marathon, to be exact--and it goes a little south. She's been taking water and Gatorade at the correct intervals and running a solid pace, but it's a marathon; a hard one. East coast April. And wind, which strips the liquid off you as you run. And, like the photo at the top, when we run the long long races, runners sweat it all out. We grow exoskeletons of sodium from our brow ridges down our faces to our jaws. We look like people who maybe drowned calmly somewhere and are being slowly taken over by a coral reef. It's sort of a badge, for weirdo runners like us.
But it is also a sign that you are losing something, and you tend to do better when you put stuff back that you are ejecting, and my friend didn't totally. She finished the race strong, scored yet another phenomenal time, but had serious cramp issues. Like 'who parked this epileptic baby porcupine in my duodenum?' cramps.
Turns out, it was just salt. Gaotrade has the electrolytes we need to replenish, and water has the, well, water, but there wasn't a lot of salt, and she kept taking the same stuff. Gatorade. Water. Gatorade. Water.
If she had just upturned of of those modern hooey nutritional goop-bags (which I admit I love and make me feel like an astronaut) into her mouth, she'd probably have been fine.
Even easier, with all this new exer-tech: a lot of people steal a salt packet from McDonalds (where they will not admit they eat in semi-orgasmic rapture whenever they can) and slip it into a pocket of their race shorts. Half way through your race, rip it open, pour it in your mouth. Not the most pleasant quarter mile, because for a while there your face feels a little like a snow tire, but it does the job.
Simple little things keeping us going through tough times.
When this whole diagnosis started for me, it was partially because of a little muscle fatigue--OK a lot--but it was mainly about pain. I went to the doctor because I thought I had broken a rib trying to do a single push-up. Good, old fashioned, pain.
Looking back, it is kind of beautiful. Just pain. Regular, human, point-here-where-it-hurts pain. Pain I was used to. Clarity, Structure. Ouch.
Everything has been so fuzzy and systemic and murky since then, I kind of miss that first night in bed, lying very still, at home, in a sweetly direct agony. The good old days.
So we go to Dr 1, and even as he speaks about lymphoma and leukemia and marrow, he says "first thing: drink a lot of water. It'll help flush out what is causing the bone pain."
And son of a bitch if he wasn't dead-on right. One night later, I'm hurt, but it is less: specifically, effectively, less.
Then we get here to the Dr 2 team, and they say "we may or may not put your on this flushing stuff, but drink a lot of water, it'll help your kidneys and all as the bad things get pushed through."
And damned if they weren't right. I felt better, I seemed to have a little more energy, and my labs always came back with good kidney numbers. Oh joy, modern science just humming along!
N becomes my friendly water devil--the sports bottle disappears and reappears full in magical jaunts to the lounge. We experiment with slight flavorings of Gatorade, lemon juice, Pom. It becomes one of the rare little hooks of effort, involvement, we can hold onto to feel a little less like passengers on the 5:15 to Cancer Town.
Then chemo. Did I mention that sucked? Did I mention the alkaline layer of sewer tar that coats your mouth? That turns most flavors into something like 'I vaguely sense chicken, but mostly hubcap.'
So I go down to just water. No flavoring, no mixing, no juices. Maybe a ginger ale for the nausea, but only one of those small cans that make you feel like Andre The Giant.
Just water. But I am a good boy, a good athlete, a good performing bear. I do what I am told. I m not blaming anyone, just framing this in the context of actor-boy who wanna do good.
Every morning on my lap I down a whole squeeze bottle. Funny, because out in the real world I used to drop seven hot fast miles and need half of one, but in here I'm a doormouse trying to pull bricks, so a whole bottle it is. It becomes part of the pacing--round the third corner at the nurses' station, drink, head for the top of the ward, drink.
In bed at night I prop the table so I can reach out and grab the water, so when I wake up with the sweats, the pees, or the pred, I can chug some more.
My mom and Jim learn on their visits that a 'do you need more water?' is always welcome, always something to do for a minute, a way to move around, to be involved. They can't climb down through my rattlesnake and pick at the lymphoblasts themselves, so they get me water.
I get me water. I learn the best ice-to-water ratio between the water cooler in the lounge and the industrial ice machine in the "nutrition station."...which is room with a fridge and a microwave.
You get the point. There's not a lot to do here on your own behalf, so you grab at what you can. I grabbed at water. Nice metaphor.
Turns out--and if you didn't see this coming by now, you're an idiot--there is most certainly such a thing as too much water. Especially too much ONLY water.
The nurse drained my morning labs already and I assume the Drs on rounds will have them and we'll get it figured out, but the long and short of it is that I was thinning what trickly pathetic blood I had left even more. My salt numbers were never coming up because I had basically had a garden hose in my mouth for three weeks. I think the issues with the beet color sticking around longer is also tied into it, into the kidney system getting just a little tired of me running the friggin faucets. I might have even been drawing some red from the veins onto the offload system--that last theory is totally crackpot and totally me awake at 5 looking for reasons to be worried: ignore that one.
Anyway, I don't think too much of it. They saw some numbers, they came in and made me stop drinking any more than a litre a day--which is probably a fourth of what I had been taking in--and they had me measure output for twenty-four hours--which was easy because little do-gooder has been measuring output and writing on their boards since day one.
I have made sure they know that I was drinking an inordinate amount of one thing, I will make sure they know that on rounds, and I bet they just say tone it down a little and add some nutrients and other stuff, and we'll be good to go. Nobody has seemed worried; just doing their job.
But still. Water. Just kind of bums me out. Is nothing safe?
And, seriously? I'm thirsty.
