A Spork in the Road

…to quote Jean Valjean and company.

Tomorrow is my last chemo. (At least, I hope so!) I am very, very excited.

With my oncologist’s blessing (and despite my nurses’ protestations), I’m skipping my last Neulasta shot. If my white blood cell counts plunge too far, I’ll have to do daily Neupogen shots, but I’m hoping to get away with it. It’s one less weird chemical to pump into my body.

24 hours from right now, I should be finishing up and getting ready to sleep off my last chemo.

Woo-hoo!

Is it just me, or is little old Smallweed from Dickens’ Bleak House a literary candidate for a Tourette’s diagnosis?

“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch, that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. “My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?”

Smallweed’s verbally intricate outbursts are primarily directed at his demented elderly wife, but they have the flavor of coprolalia.

Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed’s favorite adjective of disparagement is so close to his tongue, that he begins the words “my dear friend” with the monosyllable “Brim;” thus converting the possessive pronoun into Brimmy, and appearing to have an impediment in his speech.

And his requirement of being frequently shaken like a canned beverage, his particular obsession with money and signatures, even his cushion-throwing tic all suggest to me a Dickensian expression of Tourette’s, which would first be identified as a neurological disorder about 30 years after the publication of Bleak House.

“I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him,” says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances of a prayer, and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry hands, “I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you,” breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech, as Judy re-adjusts the cap on his skittle-ball of a head; “you, my dear Mr. George, are likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose.”

Granted, Dickens characters are a breed apart, peculiar and hilarious, but Dickens was an astute observer and grounded all his caricatures in very real character traits.

So what say you, oh my literary and/or psychoneurological enthusiasts? Smallweed: Tourette’s or ornery oddball?

Chemo fatigue is impressive. I’m happy to say I haven’t felt miserable physically this week, but yesterday I was so. Tired.

So tired.

So so tired.

I took a nap. Tried to read. Took a nap again. Tried to do some work. Took a loooong nap.

I think of the Dementors in Harry Potter, sucking out your life force. That’s what it feels like.

Drugs finally kicked in last night and I rallied in the evening, and today I seem to be doing okay. I have deepest sympathy for folks who are on chemo to hold cancer at bay, instead of to cure it: dealing with that sort of unrelenting fatigue would be a herculean challenge.

Like many geeks, I got very excited about the iPhone when it first came out. It looked cool. It looked sexy.

But T-Mobile didn’t offer the iPhone, and I’m happy with T-Mobile, and anyway I wasn’t going to plop that kind of money down on a phone, even if it was a phone that let you drink a fake beer on it.

Besides, I have never been a phone lover. I was always the person who forgot her cell phone, forgot to charge it, forgot to check its voice mail. I did not have a relationship with my phone, unless you consider neglect and abandonment a relationship, which of course a large segment of the population seems to.

Then Google got into the game with HTC’s G1, which has Google’s Android mobile phone platform. I love Google: all three of my main email accounts run through Gmail, my half dozen calendars run through Google, my contact list is managed on Google, I use Google docs. I’m a Google slut, basically.

And the G1 was a T-Mobile phone!

So, of course, I went to Costco (I am also a Costco slut) and got my T-Mobile/Google phone.

Now I love my phone. I sleep with my phone. I surf the web on my phone in the middle of the night when I wake up with a question. My phone sings to me when someone calls, and makes pleasing sounds when I have an email or voicemail message. Now I actually check my voicemail.

The G-phone does rock.

I think I’m finally realizing that chemo is almost over.

I’ve had mixed feelings about ending chemo. There is a sense of flying off the edge of a cliff into the unknown; chemo has been solid earth, preventing me from plunging back into cancer. Now I have to fly solo, and that’s disconcerting.

“What if it comes back?” The question haunts any survivor.

But today, wrapping up infusion # 11 and looking ahead at a solitary treatment in two weeks, I’ve finally felt elation.

My hands are swollen, my breathing labored, my stomach uncertain, but there’s only one day of toxicity left and then freedom. Freedom from the side effects roller coaster. Freedom from “I have cancer” (now it’s “had”). Freedom from losing days of work and frantically trying to catch up in week two; freedom dividing my life into week one (”that’s week one, I won’t feel like doing much”) and week two.

I’m one of those kids who pushes hardest when I see the finish line. Arms pumping, lungs screaming, legs burning, just sprint, sprint, sprint sprint-sprint-

I see the finish line.