Chasing the Platinum Ox

Well I’m getting chemotherapy again, and you know what that means: LIVE BLOGGING THE CHEMO!!

(Our lawyers hasten to add that by “Live Blogging” we mean “Taking notes live at the scene and then carefully editing them for the blog ten hours later after the side effects have worn off a bit.)

7:55 a.m. My internal alarm clock strikes “YIKES” and I’m up. I turn to my left and see an angel in blissful repose. So she doesn’t get jolted out of dreamland by the harsh alarm of the cell phone, I reach over to turn the sound off the Chocolate — which I drop with a thunderous racket as it seems to bounce off all of my bedside personalia before hitting the floor. “What the hell was that??” It was your husband’s idea of doing you a favor, that’s what the hell that was.

8:20. Fix meself a bagel with peanut butter. I get anxious just looking at the food before me as I sense that it’s bound to make me puke. They call it “anticipatory nausea” because you get physically ill from something in your mind. Also known as “parking lot syndrome” because chemo patients would often vomit out in the parking lot (see?) before they even got any treatments. I think about driving to the medical center and eating in their parking lot for a double-negative nausea cure. Turns out Ativan is a quicker fix. Great bagel.

9:00. Pull into the parking lot (ULLP!!) and begin a heated exchange with the change in my car. The coins keep slipping out of my hands and I lower the boom on them: “You can run, dimes, but you can’t hide!” HA! Now I’ve got 85 cents and a sense of superiority. The vending machine inside offers M&Ms for $0.75, so I jam the slot with all I’ve got but somehow come up short – what rot. I guess at least one of the dimes was able to run and hide.

9:30. Oh, right, the actual chemo. I’ve been away so long that I receive extra attention from two of the nurses, Martha and Myra. There’s some confusion about whether I’m meant to see the nurse practitioner Brenda, but it’s quickly cleared up by Jason. I start to wonder if the center isn’t leaving itself open to a lawsuit claiming preferential hiring practices for trochees.

10:00. No wait here’s where the chemo comes in. Martha (my dear) stabs me in the chest and hooks up three, maybe four bags, one of which is Oxaliplatin, which I know from experience is some heavy shit. Fortunately I’m on five different anti-anxiety / anti-nausea meds, which reminds me I need a re-up on my old friend Ativan. Only after I dial the number does it occur to me that I’m calling not a CVS but the on-site pharmacy. “Wait — aren’t you here in the building?” Well right they are! It probably would have been more efficient for me to drag my IV pole until I got within shouting distance: “I need a hundred Vicodin and a bottle of SoCo to go!”

11:00. Knowing that nothing bad can happen to you while you’re listening to Abbey Road, I load it up on the iPod. Two tracks in it’s time to skip over the song that cannot be named, like the Scottish play. An instant later somebody calls and talks to me for three minutes and twenty seven seconds, drowning out “Oh Darling” with military precision. Come on. If you can hear my iPod from where you’re calling, why didn’t you call when I was playing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” ? I can’t even stand the name of that — oh God damn it!

11:30. A heartfelt exchange with another patient follows:

…………………….ME: **Cough**
……GUY OPPOSITE: **Cough**
…………………….ME: Copycat.
……GUY OPPOSITE: [Pretends he can't hear]
……………………ME: Cocksucker.

NOON. The chips I brought for lunch turn out to be stale. But the turkey sandwich from Target isn’t half bad. I swapped out the bun in favor of two slices of whole grain bread. Don’t worry this will all be edited out later when more of the chemo fog has worn off and I can remember something more interesting.

1:00 p.m. Taking a closer look at how the infusion room is divided, I notice that I can see the tops of the IV poles and their faithful bags of toxicity, but a partition about 4′ high blocks me from seeing any patients. All these billions of dollars spent to develop better drugs and they end up delivering chemo to ghosts. It dawns on me that from their side of the fence I must be a ghost myself.

Someday.

-
-