There was a ride at King's Dominion.
OK, I should back up.
My mother and stepfather bought a quarter- or half-acre plot of land a few hundred yards off the man-made-for-nuclear-plant-cooling Lake Anna decades ago. They got a cute little trailer and emblazoned a 'Virginia is for Lovers' sticker on the door. We used to go down there a lot. They would go alone as well, and at those points I imagine the sticker was more apt than when my pals and I were there jumping through the campfire, breaking our wrists seeing how far a bike would go off a ramp made of a milk crate and three feet of plywood (17 feet, one bounce, one ER trip).
Most of the trips were just for camping. Swim in the lake--I would drop a nuclear power joke here but it is, in fact, one of the safest and cleanest ways to create energy and we as a nation and a planet should be building new plants with the ever-safer tech we have at the rate of one a day, as the Chinese are currently doing with coal plants--ride bikes, canoe, build and stare into fires.
When a fire is going well on a summer night, and you loll your head back in your canvas chair, you see the magic of flame-lit oak and maple leaves dancing in the updraft. That is more than enough to keep me busy, most times.
But every once in a while we would go to King's Dominion, which has since been purchased by Paramount in some sort of 'nobody will notice we're forty years late buying theme parks and now we're just like Disney' idiocy.
I don't even know if it is still there. Once the DC beltway got as bloated, angry, and useless as both Bush administrations, we kind of stopped going.
At King's Dominion there was the King Kobra, which was a single shot down a track, a loop, and steep incline to slow your progress, and then the same trip in reverse. For the time, spectacular.
There was the Rebel Yell--it doesn't take much distance from a city for Northern Virginia to grab its redneck idolatry like a pitcher grabbing his crotch--which was a classic wooden coaster that sped and creaked and had the kind of initial drop that lovingly placed your testes just to the left of your pancreas--which I can locate with ease these days.
And there was this other ride. I forget what it was called. Maybe Millennium something--a good twenty years before that word would get horribly abused.
This ride was indoors, down a faux-rock cavern that hid the hour-long-wait twists and turns until you were inside and it was too late.
You walked onto the ride's floor and leaned against a spot on the wall, a slight dent, with a bit of a lip between you and the next dumbass.
The ride would start to spin, faster and faster, like the diamond-mesh-cage rides on carnival midways at state fairs everywhere.
But, to top the carny, something else would eventually happen.
The floor would slowly drift away, lowered down as centripetal force held you to the wall. You didn't notice at first. Then you looked at the burbling dipshit permanently across from you and you said to yourself 'son of a bitch, the floor's pulling away from that idiot. He's screwed.'
Oh, wait...
Eventually the floor would come back up to the right spot, the ride would slow, you would slide back to a standing position with not much more damage than your shirt having ridden way up your back and the unpleasant sensation that you probably just had your sweaty back crushed against the same spot as the guy you saw leaving with the acned beer gut poking out from under his 'Wrap your ass in Fiberglass!' Corvette t-shirt at three g's.
Except for me. I won the rpize.
That ride made me cross-eyed.
Didn't last long, but it was scary as hell: every single "if you make that face it'll stick that way" warning sounding at once in my ears like the very klaxons of hell's fire alarm. I was terrified, and terror and cross-eyed-ness kind of sustain each other in a feedback loop that had me pawing at the faux-rocks while still a good three feet away from them to try and find something I could trust.
Something that wasn't terrifying. Something that hadn't broken me. Something I had thought would be wonderful but was, instead, deeply disconcerting. Numbing. Horrible.
How far will the floor fall away, and when will I no longer be able to hold onto safety? When will this end?
Neulasta's kinda like that.
Long story short, we are home from the 4-day stint that is the first spate of Hyper CVAD. The hospital part was, actually, not all that horrid. Our roommate was 25 and scared but too macho to know that allowing the fear to be in your vocabulary is the fastest way to get rid of it, or at least de-fang it somewhat.
He would hide behind a loud display of ESPN on his TV, usually from about ten in the morning to whenever he fell asleep, and usually throughout his sleep as well. So we didn't get much rest.
The intricacies of each drug and when it was infused, and the 6 hour windows and the 12 hour windows and the pre-treatment for nausea or fatigue of whatever: it was kind of a slow, bed-ridden whirlwind, if you can imagine one of those. Like watching the Tony's with the sound way way up.
They dumped a huge dose of Methotrexate into me first over 24 hours. Then they gave me one last tidbit of it through my spine. Whee!
Then they gave me four fat doses of Ara-C, one every twelve hours.
And, surprise of all surprises, I was handed the agnostic's nightmare of yet another spinal tap: there is no higher power except the steel in my spine.
This time it was Ara-C. In the spine. Gently delivered by the PA on duty, but still: two Taps in 48 hours, two different drugs, and one that can burn your mind.
And--this is really fun--because ARA-C has the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier (which sort of sounds like what we should call those idiot settlements and walls Israel keeps raising in the way of peace talks), I had to prove that I was not being mind-burned.
This was accomplished by me signing my name before they gave me a bag. Then signing my name again when the bag was done. If the signatures were similar, then Katie Bar The Door, you're gonna be fine.
My signature is one of the lamest, least consistent, scrawling, sprawling messes I have ever seen.
I told N immediately that I was fighting with all my might the urge to flail wildly with the pen in the opposite direction of the piece of paper, mumbling quasi-coherently about Kim Jong Il's succession plans and how sometimes oysters and loogies are exactly the same thing. Roll my eyes wildly, quote Mickey Rooney's disabled character from "Bill For Short," and fall out of the bed.
I didn't.
There was little or no nausea, not too much pain, except the three-inch Carpentry nail they drove into my arm for the contrast dye for my second CT scan.
That CT Scan showed that I still have a bit of fluid in the 'tail of the pancreas' (which seems to me to be a likely candidate for the name of a children's book about slugs. I still have some pancreatitis right at the top of the bugger, so I still have to eat bland food for a while. Yay! More chicken, more spinach! MORE EGGWHITES!!!).
Because the Ara-C may leech into my mind, I have to take steroid eye-drops every six hours until tomorrow night, and therefore cannot see all that well at distance. Glad I got all the driving in last week. And sniper practice, come to think of it.
But you know what? We made it through OK, and came home last night.
And then today I went back to the Hospital for a shot of Neulasta.
Neulasta is this wonder-drug stuff that they shoot you with that energizes the white blood cells to reproduce, and gets your counts and numbers back up faster so that you are not slammed into the depths of low-counts for too long.
Remember, Hyper CVAD is subjective to your numbers: You go in for 4 days, get slammed with stuff, your counts crash, you feel like the ooze at the bottom of restaurant garbage bags in alleys, and then you slowly start to get better. When your numbers hit a certain level, you go in and they do it again.
So Neulasta speeds that second part.
Except it sucks. I have to admit that I am getting somewhat tired of the whole 'Killed by the Cure" thing.
The shot was quick and hurt less than the red-cell boosting Aranesp, but within three to four hours I was aching all over. Like a flu,or--a term I prefer quite a bit--the Ague. Makes me think if Poe and scummed-over ponds full of tannic acid and mosquitoes swimming death-circles upside down.
It hurts to pee. It hurts to lie down. It hurts to not lie down.
You want warmth. I told N this afternoon that I thought I would probably feel best if there could be found a hole deep enough in the ground that the earth's molten core kept it warm, and if there was a nice fluffy sleeping bag at the bottom of the hole that would be even better.
I almost went to the gym just to sit in the sauna or steam-room. I may do that tomorrow.
N gave me a hot water bottle, and it helps. But only helps, and there's just a sense of being broken.
N powered up her research skills and had blog and LLS website info lickety-split, and apparently this is gonna last a few days. Tylenol makes it better, a little, except when it doesn't, and taking Claritin helps a lot, except that is likely because it is an anti-inflammatory, which you are not supposed to take because it actually works against what the friggin Neulasta is doing.
I am hurting because my white cells are being told to get off their lazy asses and reproduce, like some saliva-flecked Mormon drill sergeant is hurling epithets at each individual white cell, terrifying it into marrying and reproducing with as many of it's kith and kin as is humanely possible.
How low is the floor gonna fall, and when can I get off?
At the same time I feel like quite the pansy. This time three weeks ago I was puking concentrated bile into a pink plastic bin over the riotous declamations of agony ripping out of my midsection with each heave.
Now I'm 'achy.'
Three months ago I was kneeling at the can in this apartment, drooling and weeping, unsure if I could stand.
Now I have the Ague.
But the downside to the upside of having a month off chemo is that the body, doing its best to keep you moving in the right direction in life and not just giving the hell up, erases huge bits of truth from your memory. In a pain-centric twist on the Janet Jackson lyric, 'what have you hurt on me lately?'
Then again, that's one down, three to go. The next 4-day chemical party will be Vinchristine and the Devil--boos and hisses from the cheap seats; thank you, thank you.
Then back to Meth and Ara-C. Then Vin and Satan once again.
Then we're done the heavy lifting. Maintenance...which I refuse to talk about yet because Jim is still right and getting out ahead of myself only means that I will have the uncanny ability to be the truck that runs myself over.
Left foot, right foot. Repeat.
