cancer – day 104
I had maybe 30 minutes worth of work to do this morning, which took me a couple/three hours, then I was posting files they might need with me out, and by then it was time for a nap, or at least a little rest, so I settled into the LoveSac and watched my fish swim for a while before lunch.
My fish are funny. I have this cool special aquarium here called a ZeroEdge, and water flows over the top of the tank, down into a sump in the cabinet, and then is pumped back up from inside the middle of the tank. It’s kind of artistic and beautiful in and of itself, and the quiet waterfall noise it makes all the time is really peaceful. I actually had it running for two weeks before we got any fish, to get the water ready to have fish, and I love the sound of it. But it creates a really strong current, and luckily I liked the chubby little Ryukins (a “fancy” goldfish (did you know there’s an AGA – American Goldfish Association? I tease you not!). The Ryukin goldfish are chubby-wide with huge fluffy tails, and they’re not as likely as some other fish to jump. And given that the water itself runs over the edge of the aquarium, well, we didn’t want to get any jumpy fish! So, Ryukins are not the strongest swimmers, which is good because they probably won’t go over the edge (though Crystal, who was mostly white, did commit fish-suicide while we were in Vegas in July), but I can’t have the pump on full-speed because it seems like too much current for them to swim against all day long. And in order to feed the fish, I have to turn the pump off, so the fish food doesn’t go over the edge before they can get to it.
Well, Rerun is pretty smart, he’s an older fish, and he’s figured out that when I turn the pump off, chances are they’re going to be fed, and so he gets all twitchy and hyper when I stop the pump. I named him Rerun because he was one of the bigger fish in the store, and one of the most beautiful, but he was just a cheap as the smaller, not-as-pretty Ryukins. I asked why he was so inexpensive, and the fish guy told me that he had been given to the store by someone who couldn’t keep him anymore, probably because he got too big or they had to move or something. So Rerun is, well, a used fish, and I am his second home, so he’s, like, getting a rerun in this new environment.
Opie’s name is more obvious, he’s completely orange in the body and the color fades out in his tail, so he made me think of Opie on the Andy Griffith show, which aired in reruns a zillion times when I was a kid. Ah, the good ol’ days, when television was more wholesome and trustworthy of not damaging a child’s psyche!
The newest fish, Snow, hasn’t even gone into the ZeroEdge aquarium yet. She’s been in a separate “quarantine” tank for almost two weeks now, and on Sunday she’ll get to move over to the ZeroEdge aquarium with Rerun and Opie. Apparently it’s better for the fish if you isolate the new one for a couple weeks to make sure it doesn’t have any fish illnesses that it would give to your existing fish. Snow is completely white in the body with an orange shock of color on her forehead and some flecks in her tail. Another beautiful fish. We couldn’t decide at first whether to call her Snowflake, or Snow White, or just Snow, but we had just seen that kung fu movie with the woman assassain named Snow in it, and we ended up calling the new fish Snow all the time. She’s sparkly like a new snowflake on a cold snowy day.
All in all a quiet day. I managed to cut my finger while slicing cheese for a snack tonight, so Mark took over. Luckily it was a very small cut and stopped bleeding quickly. Last week I had scratched one of the chemo-reaction rash spots and it bled for like ten minutes or something ridiculous like that. With my immune system jumping around and my platelets being low from chemo, I bruise more easily and it takes longer for cuts to stop bleeding, so I have to be extra careful. And I WAS being really careful with the knife, but my hand slipped and next thing you know I have a bloody finger. Mark is starting to make rules for me. “No more excessive cleaning.” “No more of that [anything with knives].”
One of the weirdest chemo side effects has been with my hands. They’re crazy dry, especially the tips of my fingers. So much so that most of the time everything I touch with my fingertips feels like it’s made of insulation and slicing into my figertips. But now my fingertips are starting to get numb (which other people have reported as a side effect of chemo), which makes it really hard to type quickly and correctly!!! It also is making me generally a bit more clumsy than normal, and I can’t open anything with ridges in the top (like pill bottles, or the apple juice bottle) because the lines in the cap hurt my hands too much. My fingers even turn red just from trying. It’s wild.
I was ridiculously tired today, probably because I worked most of last evening, but I feel so much better about leaving off my Chain work now that it was worth it to work late. It’s as organized as I can get it now, and I trust the people taking over my projects, so it’s been an enormous relief today, knowing the MBBC will be fine and we aren’t assuming I’ll be able to work during the rest of chemo, but I can help out on stuff when I’m feeling well enough, which is cool. No pressure, but if my brain gets really bored and my body can muddle through, I can always jump back in to help out and work a few days here and there. Did I say how lucky I am to be with this particular company when the cancer hit the fan?
Oh, and by the way, Rerun will also flick water at you with his tail over the edge of the aquarium, and he has a huge tail so he can flick a LOT of water at you if you’re within a foot of the aquarium!