Today is like holding up a big grey sky.
The chemo has been going OK, for all intents and purposes, but it is a lot of Cytoxan over a long period of time--3 hour hits with 9 hours in between over 60 hours. It just slowly gets into all the spaces where I hide and drags them down.
I have been walking my mile, N with me yesterday which was good for her tweaked leg, and I am not really worried about anything. These are all drugs I have had before, just in larger doses and/or over longer stretches.
And the timings have been, at least for me, unfortunate. The drug I feared the most, The Devil, has been put at the back of the list, so I have to go through this extremely long Cytoxan rally before they give me the heartbreaker.
Which means that, by the time they get the red syringe into the room, I will be run down, I will have eaten less, I will have lost weight--6 pounds so far--and I will psychologically be less prepared for carrying myself with the kind of strength and momentum with which I would rather meet the Devil.
And then they'll pop off a little Vincristine at the end. You know, just for fun.
My neighbor speaks French-Creole. Which was interesting at first; a nice New York-y taste of everywhere like you hear when you are the only English speaker in a subway car.
But now it is getting old, and now it is getting on my nerves. Not his fault, it is just that I cannot stop myself from hearing: I know enough Spanish and the tiniest bit of French that my ears reach out to his phone calls:
"Allo...oui. Si, tujours le mem cu sah marsh mais ploo je demine Beel Cleenton. Way way (Once the French know to whom they are speaking, 'Oui' becomes 'way.' Just happens) Way, waywayway. Et bon poor tout le monde parsk mais remulade crouton joie de vie..."
Three hours pass. He farts, rolls over, inches away. Watches, inexplicably, news he doesn't understand: why would you choose those visuals?
"Allo!?...oui. Non, di le Pepsi no doctour paypair. Chambre deux cinque cunque bey! Way; Bey. Eh? Bey! Bey!"
And now he has developed a morning ritual that veers so wildly from the horrid to the sweetly heartbreaking that I sort of can't stand it.
He wakes up hocking. Sneeze-coughing and rolling over in his bed quickly so that he can slide the trash can into range and spit into it. He does this for a while.
Then when that subsides he starts to sing very softly to himself. Little French songs. Not even singing, really just humming, breaking off to sigh, breaking off to spit, breaking off.
When he shuffles past with his urine bag--he is on a Foley and "there but for the grace of..."--and his morning toilette clutched in his hand, he nods once in our direction. And I know that my talking to N and the doctors must inhabit the same misty space his verbiage does for me. Teet for tat, as it were. No 'arme, no foul.
He has had visitors loud and soft, and the staff here have learned to come in when they see him get a visitor so that maybe they will not need to call for translation every time they need to talk to him.
He had an infection of sorts and was running a fever when we got here. I learned that 'frisson' meant chills a lot faster than our nurse did. Lying on the other side of a curtain from someone will do that. There are no atheists in foxholes. Except me. Well, secular humanist, anyway.
Anyway, there is little to report beyond that. When the death-threat of Peg A was removed and we were swapped to Hyper CVAD, I was led to believe that we would spend 4 days in the hospital approximately once a month, plus two one-day pops for Vincristine (because who can get enough of that little trollope, no?).
Turns out they sort of just made that up. If all had gone according to the original plan this time, we would be here until Monday morning. There are all these specific times after each chemo that they want to wait before the next chemo. So, six hours after the last Cytoxan before the Devil, and then however many hours after the Devil before the Vincristine, etc etc etc. Add all that to the 12-hour stretches for each Cytoxan to begin with and you are getting closer to a week than you are four days.
And I guess I just wasn't ready for that. The last bout with Hyper CVAD seemed to make so much sense: get it in you, get home, lie down, get through it. Two trips to the hospital per week to see where the numbers are, fixes if you need them, then back to bed, at home, with food that doesn't suck and blankets you've been under before. Just felt like a better healing environment.
I am getting less and less capable of eating here. I think that the time spent away has made me appreciate how absolutely awful the food here really is. One of the bright sides of this whole cancer ordeal may be that N will finally get me off the kick of wanting to take a cruise ship some day: I am fascinated by the 'floating city' aspect of it all, and have been pushing against her to 'sail' somewhere for years now. But, honestly, if this is what industrial feeding is like...fuck that. I'll watch discovery channel and make her pan-seared salmon over basmati rice with asparagus. And steak for me.
So we have chatted with the pharmacologist everyone here defers to, the smallest doctor with the widest swath, and she trimmed the wait times a bit and we should be out tomorrow. Still a day later than I had built in my head, but a day less than if we hadn't said anything. And I have such full trust in the tiny encyclopedia that I am not worried about pushing the wait times. She hasn't been wrong yet...except for that one decision to go with the Peg...but everyone gets a mulligan, right?
I am tired. Deep, internal tired; a tired that not only makes talking to people and focusing on tasks difficult, but makes thinking about talking to people and focusing on tasks difficult. I haven't stopped writing yet because stopping seems like something I will have to plan for, prepare for, then do. That's so much work.
There is a gnat or fruit fly hovering ever closer to the pineapple I have next to me that is about all I will eat from lunch (if you want a visual representation of unwanted loneliness, put about thirty cut string beans on a plate, without anything else, and put the plate under one of those warmer tops. When the eater lifts the top to see what awaits...sigh.)
The prospect of waving at that bug to keep it off the food seems exhausting.
So I'll eat the last piece of pineapple, and the little bastard can have the grapes.
Then I'll walk my mile. Goddammit, I'll walk my mile.
Goddammit, I'll walk my mile.
