Archive for February, 2006
Friday, February 17th, 2006
During December, I got daily Interferon treatments. Most days, it was done in an ambulatory services room at Perry Memorial Hospital. But every Thursday, I went to my oncologist’s clinic.
Lots of exam rooms, a nice lobby, a nice little lab for mixing meds, a great little reception room with pleasant nurses who kept the office humming.
But there was another room, at the far end of the hallway, tucked away literally at the end of the road in that suite of offices, that the nurses called the treatment room.
The first thing I noticed was the medical equipment. It wasn’t like the hospital rooms where you expect to see thousands of dollars of medical-industrial gear. This stuff, IV stands, miles and miles of medical tubing, hundreds of alcohol swabs and syringes, Band-Aids, butterfly closures, bags of IV solution, stood out like a cluster of cancer cells on a PET scan.
And it all stood out because the treatment room was so obviously — so strenuously — not a hospital room.
The walls were painted bright white, trimmed in yellow wallpaper borders that were covered in bouncy little vines and flower petals. On the walls were prints of summer scenes and every single print had something to do with water. The beach scenes had cabanas and sun umbrellas and sand castles, all were drenched with golden sunlight or clear blue skies.
The harbor scenes were filled with small pleasure craft, the kind of thing that two people — a couple, maybe — could easily take out for a day on the water, or take to their favorite hidden beach and pass the day away.
The style of the prints was that overly precious, cloying — and annoying — country style that just makes me want to vomit. You know, on wooden bits of furniture it includes cut-out hearts, colors always pleasant without having any edge. It’s the style that has lots of cats and jars of preserves and funny sayings posted above the outhouse door. Entirely too drenched in sweetness for me.
It all freaked me out; the blast of yellows and light blues, of pastel pinks and greens, of just so much goddamned sunshine. It was like my oncologist was trying to enforce happiness on me; as though if he pushed pleasant little outdoor scenes hard enough, I’d forget I was getting chemo for stage 3 cancer.
But the people made me remember.
There were no people in any of the prints.
Not a single person in any of the boats or cabanas, or lounging in the sand, or looking for starfish.
No people. As though everyone had died.
But there were people in the treatment room. It was usually rife with people, in fact. Mostly women, mostly old, and all showing pictures of their grandkids, of the last vacations they took, of the new carpet or interior paint job in their house.
They were the people who should have been in the pictures. At least, they were trying to be those people. They were all about sunshine and clear sky, all about laughter and going on a picnic and opening presents at Christmas time and watching their grandkids graduate from high school.
They were never pissed off, never sad, never resigned.
And of course, they were always pissed off and sad and resigned. But those women — none of whom I could ever bring myself to talk to — were living versions of those pictures.
The paintings had all been done specifically in bright, happy colors and the women were the same. They painted themselves in the same bright, happy colors to mask everything going on inside them. To mask the sickness and the bleeding and the two or four or seven bags of chemo hanging at their sides, to mask the two or three or four hours spent every day with chemo bubbling through their systems.
But all of it — the paintings and the wallpaper border and the women, especially the women — were too much. It was all trying too hard, and that only served to highlight the cruelty of both the room and the situation.
I hate that room.
I don’t ever want to go back.
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 11th, 2006
Ah, drugs…I love ‘em.
Got a prescription for some anti-itch thing yesterday. Took a pill before bed and slept damn near all the way through the night. No itching, no scratching, no zombie like being awake all night long. Best night of sleep I’ve had since the shots started in January.
Whoooo-whooooo! I love it. Hydrohoopteeoxydoodle or some shit. I don’t know what it is, I just like taking it. I guess I should find out what I’m destroying the temple of my body with. On the other hand, I’m sleeping so who the shit cares?
Drawback is that the pills will make me sleepy. Nurse told me that and I thought, of course it will, everything about this cancer crap makes me sleepy or fatigued.
But to be honest, in this one case, inducing sleep is good.
*****
Once the docs –and five nude nurses — were finished with me at the ER the other day, I turned over, curled into a fetal position, and went right the hell to sleep. I woke up at one point and LuAnn was standing there.
Then I went back to sleep. Woke up later and C–, Ben Atkinson’s wife (Ben who likes to call me retard) was standing there. Went back to sleep. Woke up later and Ben was standing there, calling me retard.
Ben later wondered if I thought I had died and everyone was taking turns at the viewing.
Yeah, thanks for that, Benny Bo-Fenny. Really appreciate the support.
Can’t yell at him too badly, though, he has gotten me home a number of times and bought lunch a whole lotta times.
All in all, I’d like to keep him outta my house. But in such a way that he’ll continue to buy lunch.
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006
So here’s what happened:
I got a shot about 10:30 yesterday morning, then headed to work. Not overly worried because my dizzy/lightheadedness doesn’t usually happen until about four hours after my shot, and it’s usually pretty mild.
Hah. Not this time.
At 11:15, we got the inmates out for lunch. I was standing in a room full of prisoners and more than a couple of them looked at me as though my face were sliding off my skull.
Then I felt a little dizzy. I sat down next to an inmate I didn’t know and that seemed to freak him out a little (didn’t like a guard sitting right next to him while he was eating, I guess). I got dizzier and dizzier until I finally banged on the main door to get out of the lunch room and into the empty booking room. I sat in a chair and then woke up a few minutes later with something like 18 or 20…or maybe 30 or 35…deputies standing around staring down at me.
And they were all real tall. Which told me I was on the floor.
Almost immediately, their jokes started. And yeah, they were all at my expense. I wouldn’t have expected anything else.
I don’t remember much else until I woke up in the ambulance. I remember bits and pieces of conversation and I think I remember sitting on the floor under a blanket maybe crying a little (Not my usual, screeching like a third grade girl kind of crying, but something a bit more dignified…snot running outta my nose kind of thing.)
LuAnn was already there, having come to the jail to bring me some meds and somehow managed to time her visit just right.
In the ER, I got poked and prodded and they stole a pile of blood, and didn’t want me to go to sleep just yet (I was really tired). The only good moment was when four or five nurses were around me, doing their schtick, and one of them said, “I bet you haven’t ever had this many women touching you at once, huh?”
What I should have said was what Ed Gorman said to me when I told him this story, “Well, not with their clothes on,” but I was pretty well too foggy to say anything coherent and Ed didn’t toss me the line until the next day.
Diagnosis? Not enough fluids. Not enough food. Not enough sleep.
Food and fluids yeah yeah, I’ve been hearing it for two months. But sleep?
The last couple of weeks, the winter dryness and the Interferon have dehydrated me so badly that my skin crackles when I walk. Everything itches and it doesn’t matter how much lotion I use. I’m lucky to get three hours sleep right now.
The ER doc told me to talk to my oncologist and get a Benedryl prescription, then I should be good to go.
All in all, a very odd day. But the best part, aside from the fantasy of five nude nurses, was the doctor’s note I got:
“Dear Sheriff, please excuse Deputy Barker from work for two days.”
If I just keep changing the date on that note, I might be able to use it whenever I want to stay home and think about those nurses.
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 8 Comments »
