Jay Lake: Writer

[cancer] Oh, god, the dreams, make them stop

This morning and I are going in to the infusion center to have my bloodwork done and my needle set into the port. Well, in the reverse order, actually, but the outcome is that I walk around all day with the needle in.

The last two times I’ve gone in, they’ve had problems setting the needle. The port has sunk and tilted, so it’s no longer normal to the plane of the skin of my chest, and there’s far more intervening tissue than should be present by design. This has led to some rather difficult and painful efforts at setting the needle. Intramuscular injections of saline are to be avoided where possible, I’m here to tell you.

This past time, one of the senior nurses had to take over, and go through it very carefully. I made a point of asking that she document the process for my current port position in my chart, to smooth along these next four sessions. Not looking forward to it.

In other news, yesterday was a little slow due to poor sleep, but not abysmal. And something very odd happened about 3:30 or so. I was reading Terry Pratchett when writer brain poked me and said, hey, hey, let’s revise some old stories you never sent out. So I did. Worked for about an hour, got two pieces of short SF out to be read. Weird. Writer brain has been fighting me all through April, so when I finally give it a rest, then it pipes up and wants to go party. Probably no writing today, btw, because of ‘s reading and signing at Powell’s Cedar Hills tonight. We’ll be scooting over there this afternoon for a pre-event prandium, which will soak up both my available time and my available spoons. I’ll be at the event if my energy holds out.

However, last night’s sleep was abysmal, even for having logged some pretty good hours in the rack. Around 1 am I was dreaming about me and hiking in Mexico (there’s more to it, involving a very out of place Pennsylvania state trooper and a ruined bar, but it wasn’t all that inherently interesting). At one point in the dream we were along a cliff face, as happens on trails here in Oregon, when I bumped into her through sheer clumsiness, as a result of which she slipped and fell, tumbling several hundred feet. I could see her face as she plunged to her death. I went from sound asleep to wide-awake adrenaline-fueled panic in no time flat, very nearly erupting into screams before I realized it was a dream. I had to go out into the living room and hyperventilate a while, and never really did calm down. Even now, I still have something of an adrenaline hangover.

The last time this happened to me was several years ago, when I dreamt had fallen off a high rise balcony. I very nearly jumped after her.

I’m usually a fairly lucid dreamer, but sometimes I’m “dreaming real”. Both of those dreams felt like real experiences in the moment. Experiences I never, ever want to repeat.

Tags: Calendula, Cancer, Child, dreams, health, Personal, stories, Writing

Posted: 5:26 am Thu May 06 2010 |

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