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.

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Blood, piss, and tears

Well, it’s the alternate Wednesday again, time for more thrilling tales from the cancer ward!

8.30 a.m., alarm rings and I get into the tub. I’m a shower guy all the way, but around 12 hours ago I had noticed a problem, er, “voiding,” which was relieved when I took a bath. Just when I was bragging about daubing feces on my schmekel, fate slaps me in the dick face with a UTI. My better half was forced to drive to the all-night pharmacy in the freezing rain; to make it up to her, I pissed in the bathtub. It’s just the kind of guy I am.

9.30, hammer time vital signs.

10.00, which side is your port on? Less than 150 words in we’ve got the blood and piss covered. If they send me home because the UTI has fouled up my counts your author might be able to wrap this up in under a century.

10.30, nope, chemo’s a go. Looks like we’re stuck together. Speaking of sticking, have you noticed that when someone who never tells a joke finally cracks wise, it’s 10 times as funny? The pharmacist here is always in bright spirits, but this morning she’s clearly been getting into her own product. When I walked up to the counter to pick up my Ativan, she called out from her desk 40 feet away, “Hey, do you want some drugs??” I paid with 10 singles which she noticed were stuck together. “I guess you just printed them this morning.”

10.45, they’re asking for a urine sample to check on this UTI story I’ve been peddling, so I head to the john. Come on, come on, COME ON!! Why is this so hard!? What do you — Hey that’s not funny! I quit after it starts to feel like I’m squeezing out gleets in the manner of Al Swearengen. When I sheepishly hand over the plastic jar my performance is rated as “incomplete.” Not for the first time.

11.00, an older woman walks by and we smile at each other; she looks working class. An in instant my mind flashes all the prejudices you would expect from a son of privilege who should burn in hell the day after tomorrow. You have no money; I have a ton. You’re ignorant; I have a Master’s from Berkeley. You buy your groceries at the gas station; I buy $8 milk at Whole Foods. He deserves the UTI, doesn’t he folks? Hell he deserves the tumors.

11.15, I wasn’t stressing out about the suboptimal sample because I had a hunch the chemo was going to set me free, or at least my urine. I’m not sure if it’s the saline, the atropine, the irinotecan, the leucovorin, the fluorouracil, or the act of Googling to check the spelling of all these, but there’s a noticeable diuretic effect. Sure enough, I head back to the john and blast out a winner. I have enough for my sample and one for Albert Pujols if he still needs it.

11.30, the woman I had pegged as a cracker* isn’t getting treatment there, she showed up to support a friend. A deaf friend, it turns out; the two of them and an alternate are trading hand signals as fast as they did at Carentan. (It’s hard to tell from here but I think all three are actually deaf.) My sense of superiority over her fades as I realize she knows one more language than I do; the sense of shame is making up the difference.

11.45, back to hit the head — the dyke has burst! Somebody call a doctor for the woman! And somebody report the guy to GLAAD!

12.00 pm, my best friend from Oberlin was supposed to meet me on Facebook for a friendly chat about now, but she dumps me for something she calls “work.” I e-mail her back to fill her in on all the fun I’ve had since Kurt Cobain hit the big time, and at one point I appraise her two daughters: “I see from your picture you have a beautiful pair.” Yeah, that’s gonna need a rewrite.

12.15, anybody need some urine? Got a lot of urine goin’ spare here.

12.30, I think about the e-mail I got last night from a beautiful woman I met last August, the one that brought tears to my eyes. Start crying anew. At least I can’t see my street cred plunging before my eyes.

12.45, the “Financial Counsler” comes out to show the deaf patient how her treatments will be costing her thousands. I may be ill but this country is sick. We can nationalize the investment banks and auto companies, but don’t ask for any of that socialized medicine jazz. What does it say that you can translate “You’re responsible for the 20% co-pay until you meet your deductible” into sign language?

1.00, The deaf friend is anguished, possibly about the bill. She begins to flash hand gestures with ever increasing fury and even yelps in spots. People can cry in any language.
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*Dear Jesus, the tumors you sent aren’t working fast enough, please send lightning. Sincerely, all of humanity.
**Oberlin, Berkeley, trust fund, thinks actual poor people are icky. Yep, that’s your basic liberal right there.
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BREAKING (Bad)

ZOMG! Just when I thought I was running out of material it hits me. I could blog about getting chemo… while getting chemo! Brilliant! I’ll bring the iPhone with its easy to use keyboarpt and off we fly!

7:45 a.m., leave the apartment and bust out the ice scraper.* I must not have busted it out for long enough, seeing as how I can’t see out of any of the windows. This I learn after I venture into the northbound lanes of Wornall and open the windows to see traffic approaching from the south, and from the north. A tail-tucked blogger hits reverse to reclaim the safety of the apartment parking lot. (Ed. — Is there a gas station between here and the end of this story?) So I’m like who is this guy Ed, amirite?

8:00, emerge from the Jetta, brave the single-digit temps to fill up and clean off the windshield. There’s your fuckin’ gas station Ed!! Are you happy now? I hope you just DIE of happiness! (Ed — And if I was still married to you I’d drink it!)

8:30, arrive for my 8:30 appointment

9:00, dum de dum de dum

9:10, go to the infusion suite, not to be infused but to donate blood. On a side note, the nurses here are great and they joke around some, but the lab ladies? They get into the nitrous oxide early. I just watched one of them go back to the lab room and close the door. Five seconds later I heard an eruption of laughter. What could be that funny after five seconds? Settle down, Apatow.

9:30, meet with the doctor

9:45, and they come in with the heavy stuff! Access the port, boom! Atropine comin’ in at ten o’clock, boom! Saline, Irinotecan, Sarge they’re hitting us with everything they’ve got! Mayday, mayday! Fall back! Fall back! Rufus from Gossip Girl, get in there and relieve Captain Dike!

10:30, am warned by one of the nurses that the Talker is going to be there. I actually remembered to bring my earplugs (sic) but instead I go for Abbey Road on the iPhone. Guy is so loud that for a minute I think Paul is singing about the Baltimore Ravens.

11:00, I don’t feel so good. But I’m doing better than my neighbor, an older woman who asks, “Martha, is this supposed to burn?”

11:30, the Talker won’t stop bugging this younger African American patient that he can’t believe he (the black kid in the Talker’s argot) has gout. “British people get gout! Rich British people.” What’s he supposed to say to that? “You’re right, I don’t have gout. I was just fronting so I would look more like Boswell.”

12:00, spilling popcorn pell mell, ask the nurse if I’m going to get charged a cleanup fee, like I was when I moved out of my 55th St. apartment, the security deposit on which PETER ASHE REAL ESTATE has STILL not returned to me THREE MONTHS after I moved out. Right, back to the popcorn I spilled in the infusion room. Nurse: “Don’t worry, the mice will take care of it.”

12:30 p.m., leave, drive home, pick up some chow on the way, neglect the drink, figure “Well I’ll just get it at the McDonald’s near our place. How long could that take?” Turns out it could take 15 minutes and did. Here’s your lukewarm omelet honey!

2:00, head out for a bit. As it happens the equestrian supplies store is fresh out of my size.

4:38, finish writing the historic never-before-tried** LIVE CHEMO BLOGGING post! I know, I know, writing half of it from home is cheating. But the iPhone keybaore takes really long and I couldn’t finish my homework on time because this guy keeps bugging me and I was molested when I was five. Totally not my fault. Okay maybe I was asking for it with the molestation, but the post being late, not on me.
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*One of my better half’s underground classmates once asked, in class and with no irony, “What’s an ice scraper?” At another juncture she asked, “What’s a leather dyke?” I’m just hoping for everyone’s sake that didn’t mix the two up.
**Leroy Sievers probably did it forty times
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