Equinox literally means “equal night.” Day and night are each 12 hours, and the sun rises in true east and sets in true west. The Sun appears to “stand still” and find balance and strength before continuing. It feels like a pause to me. Like a high wire artist who stops in mid performance to check his footing and his balance and progress before taking another foot off the wire. The Equinox is a time for us to find our balance for as the season changes so does our focus and perception.
I have always loved marking time through the changing of seasons. Only now I like to mark time in small increments, moment by moment, and not in big chunks, or with a vision too far ahead. Though…
Reminder: This series of posts
is not just my personal tale of woe. I
write these for myself, but I post them for the benefit of all those who are
experiencing cancer and chemo directly and the surrounding family and friends living
it vicariously.
With this treatment the pain in the
knees was much less, but the pain in the feet was much worse. Maybe you remember as a child playing in the
snow with increasingly wet gloves and then getting the idea, when you finally
did go inside, to warm your hands by putting them under the hot water
faucet. That didn’t work out too well,
did it? It felt like it was burning,
didn’t it? Ya, well, that’s about how my
feet feel 24/7. Somehow, they’re simultaneously
numb and painful. No doctor or nurse
told me to expect this level of chemo side effect. On one hand the continuity of the pain makes
it easier to accept as the new normal, while on the other hand it drives me
nuts with its relentlessness.
There were times, too, when the
general, insistent pain was accentuated by a minute or so of intense feeling
focused in one random toe. It was as if
a medieval thumb screw was being tightened on an already frozen toe. This happened both when I was lying down and
sitting up.
I’m sure you can imagine how this
makes everything difficult, even simple things such as making a cup of
coffee. Understandably, my sink filled
up with dirty dishes. There is, though,
one specific, necessary activity that really went to hell, and that would be getting
out of bed to urinate. As I’ve mentioned
before, the chemo (or some sick demon) has drastically shortened the allowed
time between the urge to urinate and the unstoppable act itself. The end result is that even with a container
bedside, I was pissing myself to varying degrees several times each night and
day. No one told me about expecting this,
either.
Speaking of night and day, for many
months now my sleep has been scattered around the clock. I do not remember the last time I slept straight
through eight, six, or even four hours. No,
I’m up every two hours to urinate (hurriedly!), and only sometimes can I resume
getting rest. Usually I sleep for two
hours, wake up to urinate, maybe snack a little, maybe turn on my laptop with
the intent of doing something, anything, and then within a half hour giving up
and zonking out. Also, empirically
evident by being awake more at night and less often during useful daylight, I
suspect that for its restorative effects the chemo formula contains a drop or
two of vampire blood.
Added to the fatigue and discomfort
of the whole chemo experience, these physical developments easily crossed over
to the mental and emotional realm. It
was quite discouraging. It does not help
to know that as my cancer continues my overall discomfort will increase. Talk about the future looking like 20 miles
of bad road . . .
As each day passed, more and more I
thought about cancer and chemo. Yes, the
cancer is killing me, but it isn’t the cancer that’s making me miserable: it’s the
chemo. This, of course, leads to
internal debates about extending my days alive versus keeping my remaining days
worth a damn. It is not only a question
of how much “torture” I can tolerate for my own benefit: it makes me wonder how
much I can and will tolerate for the sake of staying around for my loved
ones. Although the first part of the
question is hard to answer, the second part . . . holy shit, it makes me wonder
about all kinds of things related to family, my ability to love*, and what I
think of myself. Here’s a tip for you
readers: don’t think about these things when you’re feeling mightily
discouraged. It’s curious how feet that
aren’t frozen but feel like they are can make someone question how long he
wants to live.
I have a couple of light-hearted
little events I could include in this post, but no, I won’t. I’m sorry, but this treatment cycle has been
some serious shit.
Reminder: This series of posts is not just my personal tale of woe. I write these for myself, but I post them for the benefit of all those who are experiencing cancer and chemo directly and the surrounding family and friends living it vicariously.
This is the first treatment of the
modified schedule, which is now one treatment every two weeks. I had complained to my doctor that I was frustrated
with how useless the chemo was making me, and he agreed that at least a modicum
of “quality of life” was necessary.
Nonetheless, this treatment was
hard and a bit scary. Maybe 24-36 hours
after the infusion my knees began to hurt, and they hurt badly. WTF?
My knees are not directly connected to my pancreas and liver, are they? At one point, getting out of bed to urinate,
my knees complained enough to prompt an image of both knee joints rapidly
becoming just bone powder and then collapsing with an internal explosion. I imagined myself walking around on my knee
stumps with my lower legs flopping around like socks pulled halfway off normally-attached
feet. I considered using some of the high-octane
painkillers I have, but first I tried some of my medical marijuana. It helped enough that I was able to fall
asleep! (I’m thinking I should use it
much more often than I do. Btw, get a
little $10 pipe because your fingers will be a bit too numb to roll joints
worth a damn.)
I think in an earlier post I
mentioned the random muscle spasms occurring mostly in my thighs. This week I noticed that the spasms happened
almost exclusively when I was horizontal.
The human body is just full of
subtle mysteries.
I believe this chemo formula
contains a drop or two of vampire blood.
For most of the week I was up all night and asleep all day. When I say I was up all night I mean only
that I was awake all night, not up and out of bed. I didn’t count hours per day, but I slept
what felt like constantly, stirring only to drink, snack, and urinate.
It seems every treatment brings some
new bodily reaction, so this round’s surprise was swollen feet and lower
legs. That stretches the skin, of
course, and that tightness makes it more sensitive. In places it was red and hair-thin cracking. When standing or walking, it felt like there
was no flesh between my foot bones and the bottom skin. It was highly uncomfortable. I slept with both feet elevated about 10
inches, and in two days the feet and lower legs were mostly normal again. I don’t know if the edema is directly from
the chemo or the result of not physically moving enough to get my heart
pumping, but either way, it’s always something . . .
Also with the feet, the nerve damage makes them (and my fingers) feel cold and numb. Since I’m not sure when, I feel like I’m shuffling around with my feet in tubs of iced water. Someone here at the marina noticed I was walking oddly and unsteadily, so he gave me a cane. Yep, I crossed that line before I even saw myself approaching it!
Reminder: This series of posts
is not just my personal tale of woe. I
write these for myself, but I post them for the benefit of all those who are
experiencing cancer and chemo themselves and the family and friends surrounding
them.
Here we go again:
another chemo treatment.
Hoo-fuckin’-ray! That means at
least a week of being zombie-fied.
This round I spent
a lot of time just lying on my back while listening to quiet smooth jazz, and
although I could readily recall a list of things to be done, that’s about as
far as I got with it. My mental clarity
and physical energy seem to be in a contest to be at the lowest level possible while
still maintaining minimal mobility and rational consciousness. It’s like a dare to get closer to the edge of
a bottomless crevasse. The line of an
old song came to mind: “his brain on the edge of knife is like a BB rolling
down an eight-lane highway.”
Luckily, I have
friends who gently remind me that it’s okay to be useless during the worst of a
chemo cycle. Also, I have to say that it
isn’t as frustrating now as it has been before.
I just care less because there’s just not anything I can do about it. So, if my only accomplishment is making it
into the shower, then it’s a good day.
On the physical
side of things, the urgency of urinating has returned. When the urge rises, it’s best to move
fast. Remember, I live on a boat, so I
am always only a few feet from the head (nautical term for bathroom), and still
I’ve pissed my jeans. It’s better to
wear only sweatpants so I can just yank them down. I am sure that the Cosmic Manager of
Insanely Minute Details elbows one of his staff, points through a Romper
Room-style Magic Mirror and says, “See that guy down there, the one sleeping
peacefully? Let’s give him an urge to
urinate and only 10 seconds to do it before he makes a mess all over himself.”
Now, for the sake of medical documentation and not puerile
humor (thanks for that word, Kin-Kin!), I’m going to mention something about
another bodily function. One very common
side effect of chemo is constipation, and a chemo patient gets to know it on a
whole ‘nother level. I use at least four
capsules of stool softeners with pretty much EVERYTHING I eat (btw, you can get
a bottle of 500 capsules at Sam’s Club for just a little more than the bottle
of 50 you can get at the drug store.) I
also use increasing doses of a laxative, and from treatment to treatment it’s
hard to find the right balance.
Constipation can go from just being uncomfortable to hijacking your
every immediate thought and concern.
Beside the pain, it can make you sweat cold and make you feel like
you’re having a 9-1-1 emergency event.
This treatment round I reached maximum pressure on the
morning of the treatment, which was fortunate.
The nurse recommended a laxative with magnesium citrate, and I have to
tell you, that stuff is like no other laxative I’ve ever experienced. Within minutes – minutes, mind you! – I felt
stirrings in my torso. Strangely, the
sensations were not down low but behind my ribs. Then from the top down I felt a curling wave
of coordinated force. It felt like
everything in my torso and abdomen was working together. Nothing happened, though, result-wise. I imagined a molecule of this magnesium
citrate wearing an army general’s helmet and shouting out, “Okay, let’s do
this! If we’re going to win this war, we
MUST work together! EVERY part that can
contract, CONTRACT! Now! Move it, move it, move it!” Then another wave of force traveled from
behind my lower ribs down through my lower abdomen. Whoosh!
The relief that flooded through my whole body made me want to smoke a
cigarette . . . Magnesium citrate is my newest, best-est atomic-laxative
friend!
The other physical thing that showed up this cycle (it seems
there’s at least one thing new every time) was a red rash on the underside of
both forearms. There’s not much to say
about it except that with my chemo-caused dry, hairless skin, my body is just
not the same body I’ve been inhabiting for 60 years. With my beard gone (which I’ve been wearing
nearly constantly since I was 19), when I look in the mirror I see less of
myself and more of Gollum. It’s a weird
feeling.
Overall, I do not like this particular chemo cocktail. The earlier treatments were not fun at all,
but I felt like a person with a terminal illness undergoing treatment, and I
was fine with that. I was still in the
game, albeit demoted to the minor league.
THIS shit, though, makes me feel like I’m dying. THIS shit has brought forward in my mind the
possibility that things could, at some point, turn on a dime and go downhill
fast. I vastly prefer a steady, somewhat
predictable decline.
Point to be made:
If a loved one of yours ever tells you he or she has had enough and wants to
discontinue chemo, don’t try to convince them to keep fighting. Living on chemo becomes less and less like
living at all.
Because genetic engineering becomes commonplace, humanity changes. Some people are better, some are barely people, and a few are . . . unexpectedly special.
After young Jack accidentally angers the local crime boss, Trogg, he urgently needs to leave town. Everyone under Trogg’s influence is hunting him. To escape, to survive, he partners with mysterious GO-Girl. And GO-Girl, well, she has a score to settle.
Both Trogg and Jack are in for surprises, though, because during the pursuit, Jack discovers he can do the incredible.
For people who take their naps "religiously" . . .
My Driving Thoughts 