My favorite thing (or How I became girly..)

The other day, on one of my hectic downtown lunch breaks, I stood at the drug store counter in a lovely Eileen Fisher dress and heels and found myself staring at the cover of the June IN STYLE. And it all came flashing back...




8pm in the hospital. I wait for my visitors to leave, pat my arm, check my stash of gum and jello, sing see you tomorrow cheerily over their shoulder. I waggle my fingers at them and smile. The stale metalic taste of chemo and Zofran heavy in my mouth and my sinuses. I have been waiting for 8pm. for the peace and the euphoria that will soon come. I have timed it. My med schedule is every four hours. My last morphine dose was at 4pm. At 4pm, I had to interact, try to eat, try to pull off some sort of conversation. Now, I can just rest. Let myself slip into the narcotic haze that hits around 8:20pm...

And I open my drawer and pull out a magazine. (My favorite is IN STYLE, but any fashion or scene mag will do. IN STYLE and ELLE are the biggest and have the best articles [yes, articles].) And I get lost. I slip into the slippery pages of banality and beauty and cleverness and swim in my morphined state through pages of beaded necklaces and what to buy your best friend for under $50.00. I get lost for hours in a perfect, hazy peace where for once, I seem to forget the nausea and the pain and exist in a world of strappy sandals and desert rose lip gloss. I lie there, so weak that somedays I have to prop my magazine up with the bed table, and I dream of the days when I will shave my legs and rub them with glamour girl shimmer cream and slip on a pair of strappy sandals that perfectly matched my handbag, and then set out to lunch on a patio where my hair needs to be pulled back because of the breeze.

Scare

Thursday March 30, 2005
C___ Plaza Imaging Centre. 10:30 am. Waiting Room.

Shit Shit Shit Shit Shit Shit.
I know it is going to be fine. I'm superstitious enough to know that I have worried so much so it won't happen.

These things always seem to happen when I don't expect them. Still, there is this little fear that they will find something-something different. I am not worried about the tumor growing again. I believe we can deal with that before it ever gets as bad as it was.

I am worried that this is something new. Something scary that I haven't been expecting. I am so scared about being sick again. I don't want to be sick. Things are just starting to look up.

Maybe it came back because R and I hadn't learned out lessons yet.

Maybe it has gone away because of all the progress we made yesterday.

I think in some ways I have been wanting it to be something-just to prove I am right-that old feeling that I have to prove that I am not a hypochodriac. But as I am sitting here waiting, thinking about what that would mean, I am Terrified. I really don't want to be sick. Please don't let me be
sick.
This is different than other times. I think in some fucked up way I have wanted to be sick, needed the attention, needed the excuse to rest, but that time is finally over.

Please.

My Death

There was a day, sometime in February 2003,when I thought that I was truly going to die. There have been many days when I confronted the concept of my death, imagined scenarios, played movies in my head. But that day...that day, I just thought I was going to die.

I lost faith in my body. I lost faith in everything. The fear and darkness were so great and I felt totally alone.
I was in Emergency. I am pretty sure that I was in C pod. I remember the room. It had a bathroom to the left of my bed. The room felt so absolutely empty that day. And I can only remember it in black and white. I felt as if I had walked through some door and was in a different dimension. That though I could see and interact with the people, doctors, nurses around me, that I existed somewhere else. That was probably the most terrifying part. I felt, I fucking KNEW that I was going somewhere, that I was not with everyone else.

I was in emerg for pain. I was obstructed once again. I was at a point in treatment when they realized that the "gentle" chemo was not working and I was scheduled for stronger, much harder juice. I just kept getting sicker. My bowel was completely blocked, I felt toxic and full of poison. My blood count was very low.
I remember wondering at how unaware I could be at the dangerous levels of my blood. How my body was just crumbling, shutting down, and that there was nothing I could do about it.
I remember the utter terror and despondance I felt. I tried to hold it together while R and I watched a movie-the worst fucking choice of a movie-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I cried the entire time. I was grateful for the distraction but it wasn't enough. I remember feeling like I was falling, like I was helplessly falling down one of those bottomless pits in the Flintstones, and strugling, madly clawing, trying to grab the air and swim my way up to safety. And no one could see me falling. R couldn't see, the nurses couldn't see, Dr. R__ couldn't see. Only I knew I was in trouble.

I remember silently, desperately pleading for help. I clutched at my raw and very recently unpacked spirituality and begged for my angels to help me. If you are really there, Raphael, then please, Help Me. Don't let me die. Please, please hold my hand, be by my side, do SOMETHING to make me seem less alone. That was my biggest fear of death, I think. I was afraid to die alone, was afraid to be alone, was afraid that Death was the ultimate alone. And I felt alone that day. Utterly alone. I felt no angels, no warmth or knowledge of other, just terror and cold.


That day, the day I believed that I was dying, I let go. I let it come. No, actually, that is bullshit. I did not let it come. I fought that fucker all the way. I think I just got tired, worn out. I calmed down and fell asleep. There was no light, no beatific knowing of all things loving, no choral rapture, there was just grey and cold and dispair. Somehow, I made it through that day. And when I woke up in the morning, I felt a little better. That is all. I went through hell and somehow hung on with my eyes closed. And it is the greatest gift I have been given.

Never is too soon

I fucking hate CTs. I have probably had five or six, all told, and I dread the next. It was all I could do to get through each of them. Not everyone has as much trouble- I seem to hate them more than most. It is the combination of various nasty factors. To start, it is being forced to drink two and a half litres of water tinged with a barium solution. It isn't bad, but it isn't good. It is like drinking that glass of water you have had sitting by your bed for the last week. Mostly, it is the volume that kills me. That is a shit-load of liquid to swallow and hold in your belly at the best of times. In the thick of chemo and bowel obstruction nausea, it is the fifth pit of hell. That and sitting in a plastic chair, fucking freezing my ass off in a wrinkled powder blue nightie with ties, and the men's pants with the crotch tied in front, AND the wrinkled, ass-ugly "housecoat" in a darker pattern of powder blue. It is sitting in a soul-sucking ecrue and dusty rose waiting room with five or six other Cancer patients, trying to keep warm and ignore the obvious over-intimacy of their bare knees and nighties; trying to keep up some pretense of normal conversation with their chaperones or desperately trying to entertain themselves with the hunting and fishing magazine they have on the table next to them.

We all sit. We sit and drink and try to look nonchalant and cheerful. I try to joke with my company as the warm stale liquid sloshes in my already nauseated stomach and as it is denied access to my obstructed bowel. My conversation starts waning as the need to focus increases. I need to concentrate to keep it down. I have a hair trigger gag reflex after a twin pregnancy and numerous rounds of chemo. I can vomit on demand. Breathing too hard can make me puke. So I focus on a point on the wall and step inside of myself. Much like I do with pain. I try to meditate, try to accept the nauseau and the liquid and just let it be.I usually make it to three quarters of what I am supposed to drink (about 2L) and they call my name, and they take one look at me and say it is ok, I don't have to finish.

And the worse is yet to come. In order to see what they have just made me drink, they inject a dye into my blood. I get an IV and then in the CT room they hook me up to an automated IV. I lay in the CT tunnel with my arms above my head, freezing my fucking ass off (because they have to take off all the blankets) and not allowed to move. My arms reach above me around where the IV tubing is attached to the machine that will inject the dye. This is the hell for me. They talk to me over a speaker, hiding in their little room, and tell me that the dye is about to come. I hear the machine whirr and I hear the liquid run down the tube. And I feel the cold dye enter my blood stream. I fucking feel all of it. I feel it enter and move down my arms and down into my core. Within seconds, I feel a warm sensation in my bladder and in my urethra. They warn you of this, that you might feel like you have to pee. No shit bitch, I just drank 2L of stale fucking ass-water. What they don't fucking tell you is that you can feel it happening. That you can feel the chemical, its metalic radioactive fucking warmth travel through your veins and down into your fucking crotch.

They don't tell you that you will smell it, that somehow, you taste and fucking smell the poison as it fills you. It happens so quickly and completely, so much more than chemo even, that I find it terrifying. I feel completely invaded. I lie there feeling the panic rise up in my throat and choke me. I lie there, close my eyes and wait as I pass through the white tunnel and while my body is bombarded with Xrays. It is all I can do to stay calm, pretend that it is going to be ok.
And then it is over. The smell lingers in my mucous membranes and my urethra tingles with residual warmth. I am convulsing with cold and I really have to pee. I wrap myself in a warm blanket and head to the bathroom, swearing never again