cancer – day 162

Everyone sends these nice little thinking-of-you notes and of course asks how I’m doing, and I never know what to say. I know people are genuinely concerned and sincerely want to know how I’m feeling, but it seems so wrong to just spout off a bunch of awful stuff when the person was just trying to be nice in asking how I’m doing.

Physically I’m not great of course, here in week 2 of the chemo cycle, but I’m finally “waking up” from some of the chemo drugs into that state of knowing I can’t do anything or even think straight but remembering that I used to be able to, six months ago or longer. This is also the point at which I stop sleeping at night or being able to take naps even though I’m too fatigued to dress myself or do anything in any reasonable amount of time. After the physical pain part, this chemo recovery segment is absolute torture to me.

So, emotionally tortured is probably a good sum statement for where I am right now. But every day is different, slightly. The physical limitations aggravate the emotional because I don’t have any way to kill the time until some of the physical things improve enough to be able to do anything useful or the fatigue clears enough that I can think (I can’t remember the last time I felt like that, actually, it was sometime before chemo altogether, maybe before diagnosis even, since I felt like I had a clear thinking mind). Balance is gone, can’t walk straight, can’t ride the bike. Shaky and unreliable from neuropathy in hands and feet, doctor said don’t drive a car. Feet damaged by neuropathy, bottoms all numb, can’t balance on them to dance at a milonga even if I had the energy to go to one instead of just all this fatigue keeping me from even bothering to get dressed and certainly without the energy for makeup (eyebrows are such a pain to create with makeup when you have no eyebrows, my lower eyelashes are mostly gone too, so that’s hard to disguise, though thankfully I still have my upper eyelashes, which feels somewhat normal to make up). Hands damaged worse by neuropathy, can’t feel fingertips to type properly or grip anything, hands are altogether clumsy and clawlike in use, and with pain in my fingertips (and the pads of my hands, actually), it feels like everything I touch, including computer keys, burns my fingers. Opening pill bottles is burning agony to my hands, those little cap ridges cutting into my fingers and then having to try to squeeze the damn lid into my palm to twist it while pressing down, puh-leese. It’s an exquisite form of torture only a medical person could conceive, I’m sure . . . the child-safety bottle. My eyesight fails within an hour or two of any concentrated focus, so reading is of limited duration, watching anything on the computer, blogging. I keep increasing the font size on my screen in Word, until finally it’s no use and I just can’t see anything on the screen anymore. It’s honestly all just a pretty miserable existence, temporary or no.

But, that’s probably enough complaining for today. Tomorrow will be different.

Mark is going to be gone tomorrow, all day pretty much I think. It’s the Big Crush, and the wine club gets a bus and goes wine tasting all day. If it were a few weeks later I could probably go, but Mark thinks the nausea will be too much for me and I’m still in chemo recovery, so I shouldn’t go. I’m bummed because I’ve been wanting to go for months and here it is the day before and it’s decided that he is going (he would have forgotten completely and missed out on it himself if I hadn’t asked about it at breakfast today) but I can’t go, and of course I’m jealous because he’s going to have so much fun. But he needs to have that, and it won’t happen with depressed whiney little me along being sick and miserable from the bus movement and making him feel bad for having a good time with his friends (our friends? maybe, maybe the wine club feels like I’m a friend now, it’s been like six months that I’ve been going to all the events with Mark, except for one, but his last girlfriend is in the club too, which can make things a little awkward since he and I have been together longer now and she rarely shows up for the wine events anymore, which I feel kind of bad about but at the same time have that tiny little relief of not having to deal with it, even though it just is what it is. When she reintroduced herself to me after my cancer e-mail went out, I didn’t remember exactly who she was because it had been like a year since we’d seen each other much when I was teaching, and that little me-not-remembering-her-completely I suspect really set her off given that I was with her ex-boyfriend, when I look back on it. I tried to apologize and recover, but she’s avoided me ever since).

It’ll be a long day tomorrow though, and when Mark gets back, well, he’s probably not exactly going to be stone-cold sober after wine-tasting from a tour bus all day, you know? As for having a day alone to myself, well, aside from the fact that I’m obviously going to disobey doctor’s orders and drive my car to visit the cats and run errands, well, it will be nice to have a day of quiet where it doesn’t matter what I do or when as long as I keep on my meds, which I’ve been doing ok all along so why not on a day when Mark’s not around at all. Besides, we’re going into week three of the chemo recovery cycle, and this is just my flu week usually, I’ll have a mild temperature and feel like I have the flu all week, besides everything else that is still cleansing from my system from the chemo poisoning.

Ach, damn, now there’s a neuropathy burning in my toes on my right foot. Why does this stuff have to keep getting worse???