Mean Girls with Needles

No... Warm and Cuddly doesn't quite describe it

Well I just finished day 1 of cycle 1 of what will be at least 2 cycles of ‘mass reduction’. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound half bad… ‘Mass Reduction’, sounds like something we might sign up for. Sounds like something with math and points and plans and even lasagne and cake (mind you I don’t much like cake, well, I like a few kinds of moist cake, but for the most part… no cake for Robin… if I had been a Parisian mob in the late 1780s, I might have been particularly incensed by the queen’s (alleged) remarks… no gateau for me, thank you very much your Imperial Majesty, I prefer le pain)…

But ‘mass reduction’ has very little to do with lasagne or cake. It has to do with making Mal, Wash and Book (my three principal resident oncs smaller… well, all the oncs smaller I suppose. One advantage of chemo over surgery, is that no one has to hunt each individual onc in the dark nooks and crannies between the small intestine and the descending colon. (If it just popped into your head that ‘there’s an idea for a game in there somewhere’ you’re not alone, but you would be the only one playing it.)

I’ve been what one has to call lucky up to now. For the most part, there has not been much pain and nausea associated with the oncs… some with the chemo and some with the surgery, but not with just the ‘cancer’. By Day five of chemo-cycle um… eleven on January 18th (coincidentally, the second anniversary of my surgery) this has changed somewhat. The P&N is too much to countenance more chemo and the mean girls with needles are talking about making me comfortable… Making me comfortable is a code phrase… and a ‘mean and needley’ one at that… It’s like a splash of icy cold water on your greatly sensitised tender bits. You start thinking about this stuff and you stop being a brave, distinguished author in his fifties and you’re an angry, frightened little two year old. The mean girls with needles are watching me. I have to work through some decisions. If the Pain and nausea are going to come looking for me, then hiding isn’t going to work. I’m going to need some of this Pain Management stuff.

Pain Management sounds like a fun thing. Well, in comparison to just ‘pain’ it sounds very good. What’s involved is a steady slow dose of one of those marvellous painkillers via a 72-hour patch in my case. The patch isn’t supposed to handle all the pain. There is supposed to be the odd flare up that we (well, I really) take care of with fast release pills (or sometimes shots). Sort of like a game of whack-a-mole. As for the nausea… well Gravol ™ works for that. So the new plan is get the pain and nausea under control then try another round of chemo… then scan to see what’s what.

Problem is, the nausea (by which I mean P-V) was caused by one of the oral ‘rescue drugs’. So they are going to admit me to the hospital and administer all my drugs IV. Five or six days in hospital will pretty well kill the week. Although, on the other hand, I seem to be sleeping or trying to sleep 20 hours a day anyway… maybe I’ll be able to ‘catch up’ on my sleep… it works that way right?

I don’t really want to go into the hospital. Can I take any of my mean girls with needles? I only need a few… No? I don’t want other mean girls. I want these ones…

This is why I’ve been so quiet lately. Pain Management makes me sleepy but doesn’t quite let me sleep. However, it does let me get comfortable quite often when I lie down. That’s a big win J.
One Chemotherapy Cycle Later.

It’s February. I got out of the hospital four days ago, and I feel like a loathsome amoebic mass that dreams about life and death all the time and wonders about things that should or should not be said. I had to stop my pain management and now I am drug free. The Phentanyl was making me nauseous beyond my limited toleration. Rather pain than nausea. I’m not that used to nausea. Nausea and I are not closely acquainted, even when I’m sick or drunk. Other people get nauseous, normally I just faint. Fainting is better, I can feel it coming and I can lie down before my ageing cranium intersects with something harder than itself. These days, ‘things harder than my cranium’ includes a frighteningly large and increasing number of things. Don’t intersect your cranium with something harder is almost a ‘rule’ of fainting.

This is the third time I have sat at my desk in about two weeks… my friends are almost frantic, those who cannot phone. I’m pretty frantic myself; chemotherapy is devastating, and not just because your eyelashes fall out. It is a process that raises life and death issues and gets you to answer them yes or no… and the answers take a while to work out.

I take an hour and ‘do my spam’… I used to call it ‘doing my email’ but the nature of the internet has changed with the US Republicans’ stupid ‘opt out’ spam rules… I want a system where you buy a 5 cent stamp to send an email, can opt to receive only stamped emails, and get to cash in the stamps for full value. That way, if someone wants to send 1,000,000 emails in one day then he can damn well pay $50,000, I can make money out of a system like this ;) More to the point, it will stop spam from clogging up the internet and hurting everyone. I only have 400+ spams. So I deal with them in half an hour; that’s progress. But I look at that half hour like a lost child. I have the same attitude about phone trees, and I’m developing a ‘tick’ about good grammar and spelling… so watch out.

Pretty soon I’m going to have to start saying some of the stuff that’s important.