Today is the first day I don’t have to take any drugs I don’t personally feel like taking! That doesn’t sound very Methodist, or very Quakerly, does it? It has gotten interesting trying to figure out which drugs are causing which side effects, and which ones are worth the trouble.
It is like this is a military campaign, and I am only maybe a sergeant or thereabouts, and I’m in way over my head. We are chasing Al Qaeda operatives through the landscape—but the landscape is me! The command center is somewhere in my tired brain. Or maybe it is in a ritzy doctor’s office somewhere in Chevy Chase, with racks of helpful pamphlets, and a basket of flavorless ginger snaps. We know where their base camp is. But we’re not taking it out yet. We’ve infiltrated it. We’re intercepting their cell phone calls and following the coming and going of their money. What we’re worried about is not the base camp, but those lone-wolf operatives out there on their own, causing mischief somewhere in the lungs or bones.
So we are poisoning these bastards’ food supply, among other things. The oncology nurse showed me two tubes of red stuff they had to shoot into me. It was too red, redder than the frosting on a birthday cake from Giant. She had to sit there and push it through my vein, she said, because it was so caustic that, if any of it leaked from the portal into the flesh, it would cause a burn so bad we would need a plastic surgeon to fix it. I must really trust that woman, because I let her do it. Fortunately she warned me it would also make me pee red tempera paint—a warning that saved one unnecessary trip to the E.R. Daunting to watch that stuff flow into me, but as they say, fear concentrates the mind wonderfully.
My nurse also warned me that the $8,000 shot they gave me to keep my immune system going has a few side effects of its own. Basically, it riles up the bone marrow to get moving. Turns out, this is intensely painful. Who knew? She told me this after the fact. She said when it started hurting, I could call any time and ask for Vicodin or whatever, and they would say, “Yes, ma’am! How much?” She said it would take a few days before this happened.
It happened last night. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought it was because I was trying to not take the anti-nausea medication. That one makes me wacky, in a bad sort of way, so that I have to really concentrate hard and hold on with two hands just to walk on a treadmill I’ve been using for four years. I would rather have my stomach hurt. But it turns out, it wasn’t my stomach, at all. It was my breastbone, about to crack open. Followed by my knees. So it’s time to call that oncology nurse and head back to CVS. We are about to start sampling different pain drugs, to see which ones make me least wacky, or if wacky is unavoidable, at least wacky in the best possible way.
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