[Cancer]
[cancer] Chemo series three, session six, day one
Waterloo Productions will be following my chemo experience in realtime on Facebook this weekend. Come along for the ride, if you’re curious.
It’s chemo six of series three, and is significant for a couple of reasons.
One, this is the thirtieth chemotherapy session I’ve had since the beginning of 2010. I’m here to tell you, this shit gets old. Beats dying, though.
Two, this is the breakpoint. I’ll be off chemo from after this weekend until about the beginning of February, 2013. We need my body to rest and recover for about four weeks so I can tolerate the liver resection I’ll undergo in mid-January. That will be my third liver resection and fifth major surgery in past five years. I’ll need two or three weeks to recover from surgery so I csn tolerate the chemo again, at which point I’ll have six more sessions through about April or early May of 2013.
What this does mean is I’ll have a week or two of slightly more normal energy and appetites starting the week after Christmas. I might even be able to go out in the daylight. Oh what fun.
Pretty soon I’ll be talking to my surgeon about dates and tests and so forth. I have another CT, as well as a PET and an MRI in my near future. Hopefully all that medical radiation and superstrong magnetic fields will transform heretofore unknown genes in such a way as I’ll acquire superpowers.
Meanwhile, I prepare to toddle off to the oncology clinic and experience the wonderful world of chemo side effects. Lately even the Ringer’s they start me with gives me nausea, which is obviously and annoyingly psychosomatic, so now I have to take a Lorazepam to even get in the chair.
Hope your weekend is better than mine will be.
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Posted: 8:37 am Fri December 14 2012 |
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Does it beat dying?
I’m sure that’s an enormously insensitive thing to say to a cancer patient, but I can only imagine myself in your position and I keep thinking that I’d rather die than go through that much pain…
Sure it beats dying. At least for now, with a teen-aged daughter in the house who needs her father, even sick, infinitely more than she needs to be fatherless.
And in my case, there’s been fairly little physical pain. Discomfort beyond measure, in a hundred different axes of sensation and experience, but not pain, except around the multiple and ongoing surgeries.
Ghosttie, the only person who can make that call is the person doing the suffering. Everyone else is kibitzing, and you will never know what call you’ll make until you have to make it…