I’ve been up since … 8 AM or so, after a nearly full night’s sleep. I felt okay but time was already starting to blur and slip. By 10:30 AM, I felt as if it should be 3 PM. The infusion causes that sensation and the follow-up medications ramp it up: powerful steroids and anti-nausea meds.
I went down for a nap like a fractious toddler by 1 PM, after assuring Steve I was okay to be left alone. There’s not much he can do for me right now, before the real neuropathy sets in. My fingertips are getting numb, my feet are getting tingly, but I’m not feeling the serious wobble or muscle spasms that make me feel debilitated. Not yet.
This is the day in the chemo cycle when I start to slide into the totally different tempo of life with cancer. I start sleeping when I want, eating when and if I am hungry, and leaning hard on fluids and caffeine to keep my innards mostly regulated. The only thing I must do, without delay or fail, is take pills. That’s not a lot to frame a day, and certainly not a lot of accomplishment, not when I’m accustomed to meetings, phone calls, appointments, and such.
I keep thinking – hoping, really – that this sideways motion will get easier because I’ve done it three times before. But it doesn’t. I am anxious and I am resentful, and I want to hurry up and get out the other side.
The truth is, I’m waiting for something else to happen, something that might or might not occur. I’m waiting to see if the side effects will 1) increase in intensity, 2) spread out into more than 5 to 7 days, or, Goddess forbid, 3) both. This increase is the part of chemo that no one has wanted to talk to me about, not with any sort of frankness. The few people who have touched on that subject will dance around it, their voices going tight and their words petering out. They don’t want to remember and I have enough respect for their suffering that I don’t want to press for details.
So here I am, gently floundering, as the chemo fog rolls in and my mind starts to go soft. The physical pain and discomfort will come, the numbness and tingling will sharpen and overwhelm the fine muscles in my legs and lower back. But not yet. In the meantime, I will go back to watching this fun movie on T.V., I will finish this iced mocha, and I will wait for the next take-more-pills alarm to go off on my phone without checking for it. That’s my job for now – so I can do something else, something approximating normal, sometime later on.
medicinal sausage 