Rnd 3: Wk 1

Trying to get comfy.

It’s amazing the things you learn to detest.  Cancer is a place to start and is more than earning of loathing.  I hate all the ways it changes my life from the lack of hair and of normal routines to the overall disruption to my family.  I’ve also learned I hate the question, “So, what’s your prognosis?”  It’s innocent enough until it starts to feel like, “So, yeah, you’ve got this High-Grade Large B-Cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Not Otherwise Specified.  How long do you have to live?”  I get it: cancer is scary, and talking to someone fighting it leaves little else to think about, but asking in a veiled way if it’s going to kill me isn’t entirely comforting.  My prognosis, by the way, remains excellent and the treatment is curative with the express purpose of “over-treating” it in order to keep it from coming back.

Luke IV-walker and
R2-Infuser

I have a friend and colleague from Silver Creek who, having been through his own scare of an unknown tumor, came to my classroom early on in the process to remind me that through whatever might be in my path (and at the time, was supposed to be a benign tumor), I needed to keep my focus on those happy moments, those moments to hold onto when things get difficult.  I admit, that was harder than expected, but I kept that mantra with me through the holidays, and it’s what got me out for a 16-mile bike ride the weekend before round 3.  This same friend also made another astute observation: when life gives you a sh*t sandwich, it’s okay to complain about the taste.

So here it is: the hiccups for four straight days is something devised by the demons of hell to torture me. I know I am so lucky that I caught this disease early and am treating it before any symptoms, but my God, I hiccup through what little sleep I get, and to be plagued by such a banal bodily function.  My throat hurts, my back hurts, and my stomach hurts.  And we won't even go into the horrors chemo visits upon the GI tract in general (basically an overwhelming feeling of being filled from stem to stern).  And I hate, hate, hate, hate the prednisone (which may be contributing to these hiccups).  Between it all, I've gotten less than ten hours of sleep over the past three nights.  I did manage to mitigate the effects of the prednisone, so the crash wasn't quite as bad on Tuesday, but it's still a horrific experience, all of which starts with having them plug toxic medicines into an implant in my chest that get pumped throughout through my jugular vein and then immediately into my heart and body.

**Ice pops during doxorubicin

Being grateful sometimes only keeps me up so far when, in the end, it's still a battle against cancer.  That landed me into one of my worst cycles of panic attacks and depression that I've had since the initial diagnosis at the end of the first week after round 2.  I was unable to hold onto the light of the word "cure" but got lost on the word "recurrence."  We ended up going to the social worker as a couple and setting up the girls with a psychologist.  As hard as this is all in the middle of it, I think our mental and emotional healing will have a long way to go with PTSD almost a given treatment to come as scan-xiety becomes the thing.

For the good news to end on: my doctor continues to stress that this is curable and that we caught it so early.  We have high hopes and expectations of what the CT Scan will show next Thursday, 2/7, and confirmation of continued health from the echocardiogram.  In the meantime, another blood test tomorrow to check my nadir levels...and ask about these damn hiccups!



A sample of my pain, even during napping:

**The doxorubicin can enter the mouth through the blood vessels and pores and make ulcers in your mouth, so ice chips or ice pops are used to constrict the blood vessels enough to keep that from happening.