A Spork in the Road

My counts inched up a little this week, out of the “Critical” range and back into plain ol’ “Low.” My nurse said, “They’ll come back up eventually, I promise!” But she wasn’t worried and didn’t even mention shots, which made me happy.

I still don’t feel peppy, but I don’t feel so strung out as I did last week.

And of course, the main hope is for a clean PET scan at the end of the month. The rest of this is just standard recovery.

Don’t know what my counts are today (lacking a personal laboratory here at the office), but I’m certainly feeling better than I was earlier in the week.

I’ve been told one cannot feel when one’s white blood cell count is low. Poppycock. You know that feeling you get when you realize you’re fighting some kind of bug: a little tired, a little draggy, a little stupid? That’s what it feels like. When my counts are high, I feel like I could rule the world. I rise early and feel magnanimous towards the world.

This morning I won’t say I popped out of bed, but I got up within ten minutes of the alarm and managed to make it through the first half of the morning without dropping, breaking, or accidentally kicking anything. This constitutes progress.

I’m optimistic that my brain cells will follow suit and will perform somewhere close to competence. This would make me and all my clients very happy.

My blood counts are down today from last week. Neutrophils are hovering at the bottom of “normal” range, but my overall counts were down to 2.4 (marked simply with a “C” in the margin of my blood work sheet: “C” for “Critical”).

Neulasta works. It also retails around $7,000 per shot. An Everest of a number when you’re battling insurance woes and staring at a box full of past due medical bills.

We’re going to see if my counts climb back up a little next week. Otherwise we need to talk about Neulasta. In the meantime I wash my hands, avoid crowds, sleep more.

Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings. No willpower could prevent someone’s dying. And no willpower could restore someone dead, breathe life into that frame and set it going again in the room with you to meet your eyes. That was the fact of it. The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated.

Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel.

- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

…was how I felt all week. The initial rush of being done with chemo has worn off, and I’ve still got all sorts of weird stuff flushing out of my body. I was irrationally angry all week: irritable, easily provoked. Not fun to be around.

Then this morning I woke up and felt fine again.

So weird.

Tomorrow I have a follow-up with my oncologist and then head into the fourth week since my last chemo.

I still taste metal, but my aches and pains have largely subsided and my physical and mental fatigue levels are improving daily. My appetite has quickly returned to normal, and my various bodily functions seem to be stabilizing.

Yesterday we went to the Earth Day celebration at Honeymoon Island. I was careful to apply ample sunblock and stay mostly in the shade, and I still got a very light burn, so it seems my skin is still extra sensitive to UV exposure.

It took a few days to get over the anxiety of not being on chemo, and I still get a nervous charge sometimes when I think about my next PET scan.

But hey: the joy of not being on chemo far outweighs the anxiety.

Tomorrow we’ll see how my blood counts are doing with neither chemo to kill nor Neupogen/Neulasta to boost them.