Wow.
This new treatment is a doozy. I mean,
brothers and sisters, if this is going into the Book of the
Mainenites, it's going to have its own chapter... maybe two.
It is pretty involved and new enough
that even the nurses seem to be following the same sheet that we have
at home. And it takes soooooo long.
It begins at home, early in the
morning, when I have to take a large doze of steroids before we leave
for the clinic. This week I actually forgot. Seriously. I'd called
the clinic the day before to confirm that I could take them at home,
and then... I forgot. Yikes. Fortunately, there was no big issue
around that because I could take them when I got there, which I did.
Good boy.
Then, beginning about 8:15 am, I have
three medicines to be ingested an hour before we begin the treatment
itself. So, we take those, and wait. Then, there are three more
things to be taken before the actual chemo is begun. So, we do that.
Then we begin. We know it is going to
take a long time because the insertion rate starts really low and
then builds up throughout the day. Still, we're going, we're
underway. But then, we're not.
We have to stop a couple of hours into
treatment to add some more preventative medicines to the process.
See, all of these things we're doing beforehand and now, during, are
to cut down on the possibility of negative reaction to the chemo. And
these are real concerns for truly bad things to happen. So, I'm all
for using all the time we need and all the care we need to take.
Then eight to eight and a half hours
after we've begun, we go home. And in the Book of Mainenites it
reads, “And the man and and his wife were so glad. They would have
looked for a fatted farm animal to sacrifice but that sort of thing
had gone out of style hundreds of years before so they settled for
being really nice to their cat.”
The days end mercifully soon after that
because Sheri and I are both in my bed 8 pm. And sound asleep. And we
do sleep through the night, except for a couple of cat breaks where
Wolfie simply has to have some attention. He's been alone all day and
has tried to let us be, but he just can't take it any more. So, we
give him his attention and all three of us go back to sleep until a
more normal waking time.
The first treatment took two days
because of the sheer volume of chemo to be infused. We are now down
to one day, and by the next couple of treatments, provided I continue
to tolerate the chemo as well as I have been, we will be able to get
it done much quicker, though it will still take three of four hours,
I think.
The treatment is so new, so cutting
edge, that we get the feeling that the medical staff and Sheri and I
are going through it together. And we know there is no group of
medical people we would rather be doing this with than the ones we
have. There is not a large accumulation of anecdotal material and
often we simply aren't sure of what's what. It's good to know that
what we're going through is going to be of true assistance to people
who come after us and have to take the same treatment. And we're
doing pretty well throughout it all anyway.
At least at this point, I'm probably
tolerating this better than anything else I've been taking. The
fatigue I feel is extreme, but other than that... There is nausea and
quite a bit of bone pain. But those are things I've been living with
since the beginning. This is just a little bit extra.
There is something, though, that I
haven't been able to put my finger on, that is, until I woke up this
morning. When people ask me how I'm doing, I tell them what I've just
told you. But that hasn't quite felt on the mark. I do feel much
better than with other treatments, but... This morning I realized: my
entire system is fighting multiple battles with itself in the common
goal of beating this cancer. I am at ground zero in this war, and
that's never a very comfortable place to be. I may have summed it up
best when I said to Sheri, “I just don't want to feel like this.”
And it's as simple as that. It's not an
especially bad feeling though it certainly doesn't feel good. But,
turning again to the Book of the Mainenites, it's just time to do
some smiting and being thankful. And maybe there should be a bit
about pulling on my big boy pants. Not very Biblical, I know. We'll
have to see.
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere
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