CHEMO DAY ONE
It’s all coming back to me now like a bad dream.
Getting to the cancer center is always downlifting. You don’t go up you go underground. You kind of feel like a Naked Mole Rat. Oh wait, that’s after she loses her hair! (You have to find humor where you can). I call it the Cancer Dungeon.
After seeing the nurse, nutritionist, psychiatrist, and physician’s assistant, she was ready to be hooked up to her goodies. Oh, before that we were told about constipation medicine, nausea medicine, medicine to help with nerve pain, how not to eat, how you should eat, what day you crash, what’s the day you feel good, what’s the day you feel the worst. But everyone is different, so who the hell really knows anything. We are in short term infusion, which means we’re in a tiny little cubbyhole for six hours. Six hours is not short term in my mind. Everybody is very nice and Michelle is hooked up to all the poison or as I was told think of it as, “liquid healing.” Selfishly, I am trying to consume all this information without having my coffee yet and I’m dying for a Starbucks and a place to set it down. Really the hardest thing I have to deal with here is getting lost every time I leave one room and try to find the next. It’s like a maze to me but I will get lost in almost any situation and in the simplest spaces. As for Michelle she’s been having some nice hallucinations. Men coming with a badge to take her somewhere, probably the hell out of here! Two people were standing in a post office line and she was trying to tell them they were in the wrong line. And the third, a woman turned in her bracelet. But they were interrupted by the fact that she has to pee every 10 minutes. So that means getting up with her little IV pole and walking the distance from her chair to the bathroom. Lucky for us, we are the closest to the bathroom. Sorry I have to stop for minute. I’ve got to take her to the bathroom.
Last time we did this there were no iPhones or iPads so I have many toys to occupy myself without going insane watching all that shit go into her body!
Looking around every cramped cubicle is full with a patient and caregiver each with their own individual stories. We’re strangers, but at the same time we’re all in the same club we never wanted to belong to. The Sneaky Bastard C Club.
I think the hardest part of this is watching the person you love go thru this. Michelle is so brave & looking at her sleeping now I love her so much & my heart aches for her.
I am helpless!!!
