waterworks

This is not a complaint. This is sharing information about chemotherapy, the kind of thing that websites, doctors, and most everyone else will not tell you about.

The nose runs nonstop. Non. Stop. Chemo implants a sump pump in the sinuses. The sump is clear, almost water. I feel like one of those old guys in Maine you run into at the corner store. If it's wintertime, the runoff from his nose is frozen. It's been there so long he seems unaware of it, and you carry on the conversation trying to ignore it. If it's summertime, well, now and then he'll give it a wipe with a handkerchief.

My nose has been dripping this "almost water" since chemo started. I could blow my nose every two minutes and, let's say...feel as though it is time well spent.

It does seem adding insult to injury that hydration is my main job, that that has been very difficult with the unpleasant taste of water (this is much less of an issue with taxol, but still a challenge), and that meanwhile, I have this dripping faucet on my face.

Not a complaint. Just sharing info.

A friend who is in the midst of a much longer and harder chemo regimen than I am responded to my blog entry about our sewer problems with her own story. Hers, remarkably, was also not a complaint; just info sharing. Her pee is so toxic that it could burn you if you touched it. Her poop is so toxic that the bacteria that are supposed to break down the stuff in her septic tank are killed and can't do their work; their septic tank is continually needing to be pumped out, and the leaching fields are unable to function.

Hmm. That just totally deflated my little nose story. Still, I think these things should be told. No need to comment: nothing to be said, nothing to be done.