Sorry, couldn't resist a little Easter humour there.
The above photo was taken in Chelsea, some days after my release. The photo is from approximately the 60% point of my 'exercise,' which really just means a walk around the block. I still weigh 138, and my hair has started falling out in earnest, so I imagine Chelsea's denizens were a wee bit concerned about a pending zombie apocalypse as I trudged by, breathing heavily because, in an odd reverse math, when you get stupid-light, hauling your frame around gets really, really difficult.
Short version is that last Friday I was released from the hospital to go home and do a whole lot of goddamn nothing. I am on the 'be a baby' system: eat, sleep, crap every once in a while. Occasionally cry. Have bad hair. So far I'm adhering pretty well.
Monday, after an uneventful weekend of trying to eat as much as possible through the condom-on-my-tongue taste inhibitions of having a really bad case of thrush (again), we went back into clinic. Because, when you are 20 pounds underweight, were just in the hospital for pneumonia, chemo overdoses, personality blackouts, and influenza quarantine, what better way to start your week than with a Bone Marrow Biopsy, right? The NP drilling a hole in my back said she didn't have much difficulty finding the spot. I think at one point she may have leaned into the drilling needle a little extra and touched the hospital bed beneath me.
The preliminary results from that BMB are good, but there are two deeper layers that are the ones that really matter. They'll take more time to get back to us. We're hopeful, but mainly I'm trying to not interact with too many germ-riddled humans, and eat my brains out. We've installed a Purel waterfall at the front door so that anyone entering gets a solid cascade of the stuff before they're anywhere near me.
Oh, and I have a hole in my arm (again). The PICC line they installed in the hospital makes getting fun stuff like chemo and blood easier, and makes getting blood drawn less painful because they just vacuum-tub it out of the line as opposed to sticking you with a needle. But since it is, in essence, a plastic tube like headphone wire just kinda diving under the flesh of my arm up near the armpit, the damn thing takes some extra care. N has been trained to flush the two heads (for dripping more than one horrid fluid into the patient at a time) each evening: swab with cleansing scrub, plunger home a syringe of saline, then a syringe of Heparin--a blood thinner to ensure there is no clotting near the site--and then repeat on the other head. And yesterday a home-visit-nurse provided by my union health plan came by to remove the dressing covering the whole shebang and put on a new one. It was a little invasive having a stranger kneeling by your couch swabbing little scabby bits of your arm, but the risk of infection is high enough in general that I'll suffer whatever I have to.
This week should be uneventful. Now that I have written that a rogue pterodactyl from some genetics lab will dive-bomb through our bedroom window and spear me clean through the skull with his ossified beak. But I am supposed to just recover. Get my counts back up. Don't have any damned fevers. Eat. Eat. 140 pounds, here I come. I'm gonna stumble my corpse-frame around the corner and get some pizza. It'll be a little like Thriller.
-Holter
