Wishing on a Blue Star (53 page)

So far, there is a radical “flip” between where I was, and where I am now. Almost as where I was, (pre-treatment) is a dream and where I am now is a waking state. I keep bouncing back and forth between them, reminded of which is which because “then” didnt have nausea, incontinence, or the hiccups that “now” has”... Excuse me whilst I go barf...

Back... Damn. There went the phenergan, swallowed less than fifeteen minutes ago and not long enough in my guts to do any good.

The split is further exacerbated by the fact that I an typing these notes one one computer, reinforcing “now”, but when I check email on the big computer I flip back into “then”, the pre-chemo time, and the confusion deepens.

_____________________________________

Those words were written more than two weeks ago, and since then I have been struggling with how to elucidate exactly what I thought, felt, and understood about that very strange time. I now know that one drug in particular, isofamide, (not sure of the spelling) metabolizes in the brain as parts of its molecular chain “break off” and allow certain enzymes, proteins, and so on to attach themselves to complete the drug. In my case (and of course it would have to something that rarely happens) the remnants became toxic and I had a rather nasty reaction which caused some very disjointed thought patterns.

I very much hope to be able to eventually articulate those thoughts and emotions so anyone else in similar straits can point to this post and say “That! That’s what it was like!” when *their* doctor asks, “how did it make you feel?”

Right now, I can’t even say why it’s so important to me to provide that, except maybe because I found the experience to be so damned frightening, and frustrating when Doc wanted me to describe it for him.

And a SERIOUS shout to that man for spotting just how far “out of it” I was, simply by recognizing that I wasn’t my usual self. I am speculating here, but I think I’m fairly accurate in saying there was no indication in the blood tests of how it had affected me, and aside from the mumbling and agitation which was probably his first clue, the real significance wouldn’t necessarily have been evident to anyone else who didn’t know me so well.

So, with the next treatment coming up on Monday, we’ll adjust the dosages a bit and he’ll pull a few chemical tricks out of his sleeve (in the form of something called Methylene Blue which makes me pee green, literally.), and with luck I won’t be so whacked out this next time.

Keep your fingers crossed for me. :)

As for the rest of this post, I am trying to retain the chronological order so I’ll come back from time to time and see about that explaining bit by editing this post “in place.”

In the meantime, a number of things have happened these past few weeks. One is that my response to the treatment (aside from the bad stuff) was immediate and aggressive. I dropped the water I had been retaining within the first two days. Remember that for me, when the cancer is particularly active, I retain fluids in my legs and such. When the chemo works, the water drains off, and with the first session a year ago, it took almost a month for something to happen.

This time, it took a couple of days.

That tells me if I can survive the shit, I should see a marked improvement in how well it works to halt the spread. I hope so anyway. I might even be able to hope for a whole
year
of extra quarters. Good quarters. Not just the survive kind but the live kind. It’s too early to count on that, but the seeds are planted and I’m rather hoping Doc has a green thumb. Laugh!

Patric

Sunday, October 3, 2010

It’s Because Of This Man...

This is the guy. Caught on camera as he tried to hide, he denies any involvement in helping me retain my sanity by dragging my butt out of this house to *anywhere* but a doctor’s office.

Sean, mentioned previously and pictured above, took me to another nearby State park today to take advantage of the last of the good weather before it gets gloomy and starts to rain.

Unlike our last trip though, this time he was a bit more solicitous about my condition. While I can’t be certain, I strongly suspect the changes in my appearance had something to do with it. :)

I’m down to 150 pounds or so, and look like a bald headed scarecrow more than ever. Just in time for Halloween and yeah, I’ve got the perfect costume this year; a zombie. You know, the walking dead? Laugh.

Okay, gallows humor aside, we tromped the trails shooting pictures of everything that moved and a lot of things that didn’t. It was when it came time to go back *up* the dang hill that I got winded, and he got worried.

As before (and I discovered just how much I value his consideration today) he was the perfect model of patience as I stopped repeatedly to catch my breath, ease the ache in my legs, or generally tried to muster enough energy to take a few more steps.

As before, he didn’t treat me like I was sick. (Just slow and clumsy.) :) And as before, I marveled at how lucky I am to have such friends.

At any rate, while we coursed the trails and studied the geology behind the waterfall, literally behind the waterfall in this case, I had the opportunity to watch the people watching us.

It’s fairly obvious *something* is out of whack to anyone who bothers to look in my direction.

You’ve seen someone like me before, I’m sure. There is a sense of “wrong” that surrounds us. Maybe its the grimaces, or the baldness that only a knit cap pulled way down can hide, or the fret lines on our face while we moved with such careful determination and still don’t get very far. You look and wonder, and try not to feel guilty when we happen to glance up and see you staring....

Sound familiar? It does to me. I used to be the one doing the staring, and now that I am on the other end of the stick, it is easy to recognize the shuttered glances and the slight scowls or furrowed eyebrows.

I smiled when I caught someone looking (when I wasn’t frowning with concentration, at least) and very, very few smiled back. Most simply nodded or looked away sheepishly, and I could see the brief flash of what might have been gratefulness skate across their face that they weren’t in my shoes. Or Sean’s.

Even he got looked at, and at first I couldn’t understand why, but I realized the looks he got seemed to be more about pity, as though they thought he was stuck having to look after me, and that surprised me. It has never occurred to me that caring for someone, in whatever capacity, might be considered onerous, but as I watched the veiled glances shift from me to him and back again (It is amazing what you can see reflected in the view screen of a digital camera) I realized that many people are probably thinking about the inconvenience to themselves at the “burden” before they think about easing said burden.

Surely not everyone thinks that way, and maybe it was only because neither Sean nor I were the “loved ones” to anybody staring, but there sure were a lot of similarities in the scowls. Or maybe it’s all just my imagination, but then again, look at how most of us feel uncomfortable when we see someone in a wheelchair.

Maybe it’s that fabled “human nature”, or maybe it’s coincidence or imagination, but whatever it is, would it really be such a terrible thing if folks smiled instead of frowned when guys like me came into view? I’d rather hope not, because I can say with certainty that when those rare few did smile, I sure felt a lot less like crawling under a rock to get away from the disapproval.

Do me a favor if you happen to see someone with that cloud of “wrong” clinging to them. Smile broadly, or just smile at all. See of you don’t a startled, maybe even grateful grin in return. I bet you do, because there is at least one valid point to that human nature thing; it says we all want to be accepted, regardless of our circumstances or situation.

I know I do, and once again, thank you Sean for letting me take my own steps, yet still being right there in case I had to reach out for a hand up off the ground. Thank you for accepting me as I am.

Patric

Dreams of a Terrible Brightness

Amy Lane

Oh, God, it came so fast.  From diagnosis to home hospice in less than a year.  And he’d tried to spend that year well, he really had.  He’d visited family, spent time with his nieces, took his boyfriend to every goddamned family function from Christmas to Arbor Day, and still… still… it had flown by.  From a little bit of inconvenient pain, being winded on the treadmill, saying, “Hey, doc—this is a little weird, canyalookitthismaybe?” to saying, “Jimmy, baby, I need you to pull yourself together so I can write out my living will,” in a matter of months. 

And now, here they were.  Autumn.  Leaves were showering in a purple/brown scatter, the sky was interminable blue, and his body was crumbling, decaying from the inside out.  With every pump of his heart, his blood carried flawed cells, little mini-assassins to every vital organ, and his body was about as strong as a leaf-bare tree with brittle limbs. 

And the drugs weren’t even good.

“Hereyago,” Jimmy murmured, standing by the alien bed in the middle of their living room.  “I’m sorry, baby—I didn’t realize we’d gone so long after our last dose.”

Connor grunted.  He’d tried not to make any noise, or suggest that he needed more morphine.  “S’no fair,” he said, trying to be clear, but the morphine was whitewashing his bloodstream, and it was SOOOOO lovely after the terrible, suffocating pain that was, quite literally, bone and lymph node deep. 

“What’s not fair?”  Jimmy pulled a stool up next to the bed, and Connor looked at him gratefully.  He had things to do—he was working from home now, to take care of Connor through the end, but he’d been on the computer all morning. 

“So little time left…don’t want to spend it out in the clouds.”

Jimmy’s smile was…broken.  He took Connor’s hand, purple from the nearly constant IV, and frail.  It didn’t used to be frail.  Connor had worked construction jobs through college—it used to be thick and battered and tough.  Even though he’d been working as a computer tech for the last ten years, he’d been proud of his bruiser hands, and Jimmy had always found them sort of sexy too. 

“At least tell me the dreams are good, baby.  You’re doing all the drugs—tell me you’ve got some kick-ass dreams, yanno?”

Connor grimaced and tried not to be a big, dying baby about it.  “The dreams ss…sssuck,” he confessed.  “They’re…they’re boring.  Every day.  This morning I dreamed of…of...” What was he saying again?  Oh yeah…  “I dreamed of doing the dishes.” 

Jimmy laughed a little.  “I could fill that one in for you,” he murmured suggestively.  “Remember that one time?  You remember…you were all tense from work, and you’d just about ripped my head off for…shit.  I don’t even know.”

“Doing the dishes,” Connor supplied with a small laugh.  He remembered.  “You didn’t do the dishes, and I wanted to cook dinner and…Jesus!”  He was suddenly tearful, and felt like a pussy, but he felt it deep inside where he couldn’t say it, because not much of his deep insides made it up to his mouth right now.  “Jesus, I was such a bitch,” he confessed, regretting the moment acutely.

“You weren’t in the end,” Jimmy said, grinning.  Jimmy had one of those grins that pushed his apple cheeks up and made his dimples pop.  He was so damned cute he was almost nauseating, and Connor… well, Connor had always been a sucker for brown eyes and dimples. 

“Yes, I was,” Connor said now, hoping the drugs were letting him be lascivious. 

“You’re always a sweet bitch when you bottom,” Jimmy told him, reading his intent.  Connor wanted to cry again. 
Damn, Jimmy—God bless you.  Not only did you stick with me to the end, but you learned to read my mind too.
 

“I learned from the best,” Connor managed back, and Jimmy’s smile was heated. 

“Yeah… that day, you learned real good.  You remember?”

“Mmm…” He did remember.  He remembered Jimmy coming up behind him, in spite of his snarling bitchiness.  Jimmy wasn’t usually the type to confront someone when they were pissy—Connor would never know why this day was different.  But it was.

Jimmy’s body, stringy, hard, bony, and hot, had ranged itself behind Connor, and Jimmy had dug that sharp little fox-point of a chin into Connor’s shoulder, and then nuzzled his ear…

Connor went boneless, liquid, his arms going stiff against the counter’s edge to just hold him up, because his knees weren’t doing the job.  Jimmy’s hands didn’t fuck around, either—one hand went straight down under the back of Connor’s jeans, and Connor managed a grunt and a wiggle to help it, cool skinned and sinuous, cup his ass.  The other hand was out of sight—Jimmy’s shoulder was tilted backward, and Connor thought he might have had something in that hand, but he was suddenly so hot he didn’t care what it could be.

“You want me to ‘fucking get something done’?”  Jimmy purred, echoing Connor’s words, and Connor made a sound like a cross between a whimper and a sigh.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered, not sure whether to push his ass into Jimmy’s hand so he could squeeze it, or spread his legs and bend over the counter so he could squeeze other things.

“Don’t be,” Jimmy said softly.  “Unbutton your jeans.”

“Mmm…was going to cook you dinner!”  Because that’s what started the whole thing in the first place.  Jimmy had asked him to make Stroganoff the night before, and Connor said, “Fine, but you need to clean the kitchen!” and Jimmy had forgotten.  Connor got home with a grocery bag full of ingredients, and the cat was on the counter, eating yesterday’s hummus!

“You were going to take care of me.”  Jimmy flickered a tongue out to tease Connor’s earlobe, and he found he was arching his hips to try to brush the front of his jeans on the countertop, because, hot damn! Was his cock hard!  “You always take care of me.  Let me take care of you.  Now,” and Jimmy’s voice firmed up with command, “I said unbutton your jeans!”