A most precious thing wrapped me up today: a call from my daughter.
Dahlin’ daughter Erin called to give me a report card of how she
spent her summer working vacation as a camp teacher in the performing arts. I
gave her my report on how I spent my summer AS a rookie performing artist on
the center stage of science in my body’s theatre of the absurd.
Ba-da-bing. She knows what that means. She grew up around my sense
of humor.
But, I’m working hard on the positivity because I know how
important it is. I know this from thirty-five years of providing bedside
nursing care, which I believe I did well, and forty-two days of receiving it,
which I haven’t done well at all.
For me, the biggest hindrance to my healing is me (this is true of
most of us in the health care field. No, we’re not selfless heroes, but caring
for others and saving ourselves for last is simply how we help fuel the world).
In these first weeks of cancer treatments, it’s been all about the
ebb and flow of good days and bad. Tonight is bad, piling up on me --- all the swelling,
burning, choking, bruising, vomiting, and pain that this body has never known to
this degree (I’ve seen it and assessed it and charted it in other bodies, but
never felt it in mine).
Every day, as my self-triage takes another spin of the wheel, I
never know which side effect losing number will come up.
Yes, I have plenty of targeted pain management interventions at
hand which make all the above at least tolerable, but because “every form of
refuge has its price,” and because medicine should adopt that as Part B of the
Hippocratic Oath, the side effects then have side effects of the side effects
ofthesidedeeffects--------
But, wait! Now comes the big top tent of Rad Chemo, and
it’s taken over my midway: fatigue.
F.A.T.I.G.U.E.
It’s all-consuming. It’s concrete shoes in a swamp. It’s a chainmail
overcoat. It’s a lead barrel full of anvils. And, like the pains generated by this
disease, it’s another siege that I’ve never experienced in me, only witnessed
in others.
But, now I know.
This is the sixth day I’ve tried to write about why I couldn’t
write about it. When this cancer treatment fatigue moved in, my muse, my best
intentions, my grit, my energy, were all washed away like a sand castle.
Some of my cancer course has been “normal,” if there is such a
thing. Everything the Docs said would happen to me has happened, but some of
what they said might happen, hasn’t (so far). At least not according to the textbook
cancer timetable.
When it comes to illness, we each have our own season tickets.
Some games we play at home … and some are away. (That may be the best metaphor
I can pluck from this fatigue).
I’ll do my best to get back on track, soon as I get this squatting
elephant off my chest.
More as we go, El
