A Spork in the Road

My last chemo is over.

Now, we wait three months and do another PET scan. Hope that the cancer is gone for good. Then regular PET scans, spreading out to every six months and then to every year and then, at the five year mark, I’m proclaimed cured.

Next step: fight the insurance company, which of course doesn’t want to cover you if you’re actually sick with anything.

And start to detox. The poisons have done their job, now it’s time to clean out.

Today I’m flying high on steroids and delight. I’m determined to feel well enough Friday night to sit downtown for the Celtic Festival and movie in the park (Brigadoon, of course).

I leave you with two more quotes from Chapter 35 of Dickens’ Bleak House:

In falling ill, I seem to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.

And on another topic entirely, but no less true for that:

I said it was the not custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great; unless occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.

…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!

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.

Fortunately my neuropathy has been, overall, more interesting than painful, for which I’m very grateful.

The first couple of days after chemo, I often experience tingling in my feet, as if they’d fallen asleep. My mouth can be a little sensitive, which may be caused by a number of factors. My body in general feels a little numb on the surface: sensation doesn’t register quite as vividly as normal, except for light, which is blinding.

Then over the weekend, after my steroids wear off, my back radiates a mild pain from the spine outwards, between my shoulder blades. Massage worsens it in the short term, although seems to improve it a little bit overall. If I sit very still and avoid pressure points, the pain dials down to nearly nothing.

The following week I get a symptom that’s not painful, but bizarre and annoying: loss of positional sense.

I’ll be sitting at my desk typing, and I’ll pause in my work, and I’ll realize that I don’t have that instinctive sense of where my arms are.

It’s not numbness. It’s deeper than that. A neurological glitch that is nearly impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

Close your eyes. Do you know where your limbs are?

Now imagine that you still have sensation — if you move a limb, or something touches it, you register the sensation normally — but as long as you remain still, the limbs are in limbo; they’re off your brain’s radar. It happens most frequently when I’m sitting at my desk, wrists on my wrist-pad and fingers poised over the keyboard, pausing to think. Movement returns my positional sense, but if I sit still for a few seconds, it’s as if my arms and fingers fade from my brain’s body map.

Sometimes it’s just a distortion of positional sense: my arms and torso might feel very loooong, like Alice’s when she eats the one side of the mushroom. An entirely appropriate literary allusion, if you consider how many drugs are coursing through my body.

But let me tell you, as neuropathy goes, I’ll take the hand I’ve been dealt, quite happily.

The thought of rising from bed is anathema, so I am blogging from my Gphone.

I had my tenth infusion today, and just woke up from sleeping off the toxins. I much prefer sleeping through the misery to experiencing it fully awake! Not sure yet if I’ll sleep some more now or just zonk out at 8:30pm. We shall see.

The misery has a two-fold relief under it: my clean, no-sign-of-cancer PET/CT scan last week, and the one solitary month that remains till my LAST CHEMO!

I have already been daydreaming about the Wednesday I wake up and know that the previous day was my last chemo. Also the Tuesday I wake up and realize I normally would have had chemo, but not anymore. Also the day I realize my hair is growing in thick and I can leave the Kojak look behind (it was fun, really, but I’ll be ready to move on).

These are some of the thoughts that get me through days in which I feel my organs are soaked in brine.