Full disclosure: I am writing on the last half hour of Ativan and the first half hour of Remeron. So could be on or off both right now; not sure.
The Leukemia took up residence in the center of my bones, in the marrow. In a very personal space.
The Chemotherapy has to, with much much less elegance, get to the same place, and kill the Leukemia.
It is like chasing a snake down a hole using a gas-powered ditch-digger spinning an auger as big around as my leg.
But it is what the Medical Establishment has so far, and I'll take it.
But the fight, the whole fight; this is important: the whole fight takes place in me.
I am Agincourt, El Alemein, Bikini Atoll. I am the field of battle, good guys and bad guys dying all the time within my frail walls.
My intake of the mood-altering drugs has changed and bloomed for interesting reasons: throwing up is, apparently, abhorrent to everyone, including my Drs.
N and I went to meet the soft-but-quick-spoken (and apparently very attractive) GI Dr on Wednesday. We told him about the more than a dozen drugs I am now on or will be on again soon. We ran through all the symptoms, from good times and bad. We apologized that I was actually feeling relatively OK and so could not perform for him the 'pyloric muscle shuffle' of the 'look ma! A retch but no food' tricks I had been mastering mere weeks ago.
He took copious notes--his typing rivaling N's furious finding of space on the rapidly filling worksheet page she had going; half the time both of them writing the same thing.
He seemed to figure out pretty quickly that A: We had been around the medical block a bit already and understood the basic meat that is me and B: we weren't morons and C: we were interested in the mechanisms and the whys of what he was thinking and what he would recommend.
He gave us a brief version of his GI training, so that we had it made abundantly clear to us that nausea is almost uniformly and always an act of the mind. That the 'Vomit Center" (which came in second in the 1997 Lever Brands "Worst Name For a New Mall or Hockey Arena" contest) is in the head, and that what it does is allow or disallow the flow between neuroreceptors for substances like neoepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin...
...which are the happy substances, or the sad substances, depending on how they are being controlled by drugs like Ativan, Zanax, Remeron, and their ilk.
When our main Drs gave me that Ativan they, looking at the sour face I wore accepting it, hastened to add "Oh! It will probably help with the nausea."
So now, the GI Dr has removed me from the 'take an Ativan to take the edge off when you are depressed or getting anxious' and has put me on 'take an Ativan in the morning and then another in the afternoon for the nausea, and then take a Remeron before bed, for the nausea as well."
This successfully throws a wrench the size of a Buick (words with K's make better punch lines) into my personal control/addiction/drug-assisted-living ethos/pathos.
I will try and outline the most recent act of this drama so we all know where we stand:
1-Freak out first day home from hospital, establish infrequently recurring fear of not being near Drs.
2-Have heart palpitations and/or shortness of breath sometimes for no reason.
3-Actually go into Drs office on an 'off' day with shivering, shallow breath, etc.
4-Drs prove with blood tests that I am fine (for a guy on chemo blah blah blah), suggest maybe it is in my head
5-Ativan is suggested
6-I tell Dr part of why I am against this
7-Dr politely ignores my fears, which is in line with N's take on it
8-We agree to Ativan use: I consider this a defeat.
9-We get Ativan into the house: I consider this a defeat
10-I take an Ativan, and consider it a defeat.
11-The Ativan works exactly as they say it will, making the defeat complete.
The defeat is not from some war with the Drs or N or anyone other than myself. The defeat is personal. Internal.
When I was a kid I coined the term 'inner sentient mind' for myself when referring to what I sensed as a part of my unconscious that was actually running the show, manipulating the conscious parts of me to get to the ends desired by the 'real me' hiding inside. The Inner Sentient Mind would make sure my body language was not too obvious in a conversation. It would look all the way to the end of a relationship that was just starting so that, if and when it ended, I wouldn't get as hurt. It would keep images and recollections nice and near the surface to help me abstain from drinking and drugs my whole life.
It was usually doing me good, but not always. There were times when it would not allow a negative image to leave my head for days. There were times when it would sabotage a relationship. At those times, if I thought of it at all, I had to assume that it thought it knew better than the doofus me driving the truck, so to speak, and leave it at that.
My Inner Sentient Mind was not some separate, psychotic-break piece of me, some devil on my shoulder. It was just a personification I found helpful when trying to understand how my mind and psyche worked.
And now it was back. But this time it actually might have bad intentions.
I hate drugs. I hate dependence. I hate not having control. I have always, to be honest, looked down on people who needed anything by prescription for any length of time longer than getting rid of a cold or recovering from a broken bone. I have, to be honest, always looked down on people who needed pills to fix a mood, or who needed therapy.
Not being able to handle it yourself is, in short, weakness.
I always figured: think it through, get over it, go for a run, do what you need to do and get back on track. C'mon, it can't be that hard, right? Just get your head straight and then do what you need to do.
I think that may be a big part of it for me. I have always been bound by a sense of duty. Not to say that I have always done my duty or that I am any better than anybody else. But I have a sense of duty that has caused me to often be the 'helpful friend' or to work hard finishing a job that doesn't deserve that much effort or any other foolish but duty-bound way I could show that I felt obligated to complete tasks I had started.
And when it came to caring for myself, I always thought 'I can just find out what needs doing, and do what I gotta do, and get it done."
And that rarely meant drugs. Even my wisdom teeth: they gave me painkillers but I didn't need them--or sell them to the local hood who bought them off students. I just had one painful night and then it started getting better and then I was done.
I take an Advil for a muscle strain or a headache, but I always feel a little bad about it, like I am just cheating to make the pain go away faster, and that with hydration or stretching or just some down time I could achieve the same thing without 'help.'
Well, there are demons inside me now--in my version they are giggling or outright laughing--setting me up to get on antidepressants come hell or high water. If I won't take them for happy happy, then by god I am going to have to take them so I stop hurling.
Now I have a Dr prescribing me happy pills solely as a way to not throw up.
And, granted, my dosage is a lot lower than the bummed-out people get. Apparently not hurling is somewhat easier than not wanting to kill yourself and your family, or something like that.
And I am in therapy...but that's a whole post to itself, believe me.
And I don't WANT any of this. In a way, I don't want the drugs and the therapy even more than I don't want chemotherapy, terror, and Leukemia.
And I have a choice, but even I am not bone-headed enough to go Christian-Science on myself and just try to get through it on prayer or pop rocks or whistling a happy tune. I understand the medical necessities.
The GI doc blankly scoffed at the idea that I would get addicted to what he was giving me.
But that's not really what breaks me in all this. I believe that I can and will stop taking each thing as soon as I am allowed. It isn't that.
It isn't that.
It is that I NEED them in the first place.
There's a true me, a perfect replica me, the me I want to be when I grow up, the me I think would be my favorite me if I met him, the me who is the best husband, the best actor, the most dedicated friend and coworker, the me who deserves to be smiled at by kids and dogs.
I keep that me locked in my center, most of the time on a nice pedestal where I can strive to be him.
And these pills...THAT me has to take them, too. I won't get better unless that inner me I cherish and try to keep unchanged by the invading world, until that me pops an Ativan because he's worried about a VO job. That me stumbles back to bed, one hand trailing the wall, because the Remeron makes him feel like a drunk on his midnight calls of nature. That me has to then question himself: am I doing OK, or am I just a little high and feeling OK?
Am I doing OK?
You know what, kiddo, I don't know. I got no clue. Yer on too much stuff, y'see, kid, so I can't see through the fog to see if what I'm seeing is you or just some'a the junk yer on.
Can I take it? Can I handle this disease?
Hey, kid, stuff a sock in it, willya? We'll never know if you coulda hacked the whole ride to hell and back, 'cause you went and popped the pills, dintcha? So we'll always have no friggin idea what the true you woulda been like walking that long walk. Y'copped out, kid, y'took the hand they offered, y'took the ride instead'a walkin'.
Hey, where are you going?
Kid, I got no time for impostors. I spend my time with true people, people who know who they are when they get up and are still that guy when they bed down. People who walk in honest shoes and cut the breeze of life with their upturned faces. Men and women who, all day and every day, are themselves.
So you're saying I'm not like those people? I want to be. I want to be.
Kid, it's a one-shot deal, and you popped the pill...take it easy kid. I gotta go.
And this battle, these voices, this sense of loss or lost opportunities to be true to some ridiculously chivalric notion of self: it's all happening all the time, as I sit here at this computer, as I eat a really very unnerving amount of chicken salad over the past two weeks, as I type excerpts from my wife's phenomenal new book into a script for her premiere transmedia event. As I ride a bike without going anywhere, with the Tour de France on the tv on fast-forward in front of me.
As I sit on the edge of the couch and burst into tears.
As I laugh, every time, at America's Funniest Home Video's montages.
As I sit in my desk chair and weep into my hands.
As I toss my head back, swishing the water to make sure the tiny, tiny Ativan goes down my throat, and then pause to mourn.
As I inhale deeply because that stretches your skin tight over your medi-port and makes it easier for them to sink the needle right the first time.
As I lay my head on the pillow,
prepare to sleep next to N,
and another day of battle, with
myself.
