time and poison

I am a terrible backseat driver with Time. Slow down! Hurry! Stop right here. Go there, now. Terrible.

It is March, at last. And still I am dissatisfied and want this tantalizing month to hurry its way through.

If you are someone who wants to savor the moments of this month, with its promise of warming earth and new growth, may my cajoling of time have the opposite effect on your experience of its passing. May time move like moss for you.

For months now, I have been dogging time to hurry the heck up. My days have been dragging their sorry asses through time as I wait to feel less chemo-sick. Laura and I are actually doing the iffy practice of crossing days off the calendar. January's 31 days and February's 28 are crossed off, but March and April have no blue highlighter Xs at all, and they look endless.

I remember crossing off days during particularly long semesters in high school; I'm pretty sure it doesn't help. But it's hard to stop now. It's like watching the big clock in the station when you are waiting for someone you love to arrive on a train that is late, maybe even broken down somewhere along its tracks. You're tired and anxious. You look at the clock so often that you accidentally slow down time.

Time passes slowly when you feel crummy; I am gathering lots of data on this.

A number of people have asked me if it helps to think of the chemo as sending in little soldiers to blast away at cancer cells. Someone else asked if I had considered that I embody the battle between David and Goliath. I wonder if I am supposed to embrace these metaphors for battling the enemy, battling evil. It just doesn't feel true to me.

What does feel true is that I'm getting poisoned. Oh, I understand why I'm getting poisoned. And while I have very deliberately elected to undergo this treatment, there is no denying what is actually happening. When in the course of a few weeks your hair falls out, your gums recede, your teeth ache, your whole mouth is rotting, food tastes like toxic waste, your eyes tear yet are painfully dry, your body moves through space as though air has thickened, chowder-like, this is medicinal poison doing its work.

An oncologist friend said point-blank, "Oh, this will damage your heart." I appreciated his honesty, but it is hard to think of all the nice body tissue that is paying the price while we hunt down a few terrorist cells (again with the military metaphor!) that might be hiding out in the dark corners of my body.

Certain things give me an actual whiff of the poison inside me -- the smell of dishwashing detergent seems to be the worst, but some soaps are not much better. Coffee grounds, bananas, steaming soup, peanut butter -- anything that gets the olfactory factory up and running -- churns up the chemicals inside me, too, bringing the poison to the surface of my consciousness and my tongue.

I'm anxious about the new poison that is coming on Thursday: taxol. When the doctor writes on the instruction sheet: "OKAY to take narcotics," it's hard not to be anxious. Like pretty much any narcotics, I think. "What have you got leftover from surgery?" she asks. Oh, this narcotic, that narcotic. "Okay, take those."

I did negotiate to take a bit lower a dosage of pre-infusion steroids. Since you're in danger of having a sensitivity (read "possible life-threatening allergic reaction") to taxol, you're supposed to take 5 Decadron at bedtime the night before treatment, then 5 more at 6 a.m. I got her down to 4 instead of 5; a bone she tossed to the patient who worries about sleep. Essentially you should expect to pull an all-nighter before treatment; the steroids will keep you up. Then you are wired all the day of treatment, and then you crash. Like for 4 days of exhaustion and pain. But you get to take narcotics for the pain.

Remember me on narcotics last time? They're what brought about the Hell of Constipation, and led to Laura the gladiator's willingness to do the unthinkable to rescue me. Gosh, I hate to go back there. I'll bet she does, too.

It's bedtime, March 1. I'm going to get the blue highlighter and cross off the day. Come on, Time, let's head to bed. We can both rest there for awhile.