Sunday, July 10, 2011

Day (and night) 6: No Man's Land

Update-
Day 6:
Change to Pill Schedule- (will change again on Day 8)

9:30 AM:
1 Pepcid, 1 Reglan, 1 Zofran

3:30 PM:
1 Reglan

9:30 PM:
1 Pepcid, 1 Reglan, 1 Zofran

Day 6 went by relatively well, all things considered. During my last two cycles I'd come to realize that talking on Day 6 was always annoying because my mouth did not want to move (probably a personal thing), so this time I camped out in front of the TV with roughly 50 otter pops and watched almost an entire 14 hour Harry Potter marathon, trying to wait out this storm out (eating small meals every 2-3 hours and moving around during commercials).

It actually worked pretty well and I was feeling pretty good so I decided that yes, I was doing well enough to go sit in a restaurant with my friends for an hour or two.

Bad Decision.
I think a "rule of chemo" that should exist for recovery after the intense part of a BEP cycle is to stay home. Regardless of how you're feeling, stay inside your own house. Within 2 hours I was back home, laying on my side, curled up in bed. From there the night just got weird.

1:20 AM- I woke up with a gassy feeling in my stomach, as well as pressure in my abdomen. I sat up and stretched a bit. Stretching amplified the discomfort. So I stopped moving. 5 minutes later, things settled down. Okay, I thought to myself, just focus on some inner peace and sleep it off.

1:50 AM- I'm still awake, just lying there very still. Why? On my way back into bed I passed by my copy of Lance Armstrong's It's Not About The Bike and my mind began to wander... What if BEP wasn't enough to get me an all clear? I knew what the next lines of treatment (TIP, VIP) were like and they scared me. It wasn't the chemo part of them that scared me (though it's going to a hell of a ride if my situation ever comes to that), it was the fact that I'd be an in-patient and need a catheter. As someone who, at the beginning of my chemo cycles, had to have his IV covered up during treatment the thought... it drives me insane.

I love to be challenged. As an athlete, I crave being down at the start of the final round. I willingly train myself to take in as much pain and discomfort as possible and just keep begging for more. As an 18 year old (generally) healthy guy, I love pushing myself to the limit and working through things to live life. Nausea? Bring it. Fatigue? Yeah, I've run suicides for hours on end before. You want to run a plastic tube into my what? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! How do you even get that in there?

And that was that. For about an hour in the middle of the night, I was starting to have a mental breakdown for the first time. It's those damn 'what if' questions that get you. As hard as chemo seems, it's not the chemo that's the problem; it's the darkness of all the stuff before and after chemo.

4:00 AM- I fell asleep for a little bit and then woke up feeling restless but fatigued. It was the most frustrating feeling on the planet; I wanted to get up and move around, but it was as if I had no command over any part of my body to do so. Add in the nausea and gassy stomach.. yeah. I found it within myself to get up and walk downstairs by 4:30 in the morning and I grabbed 10 otter pops out of the freezer, sat down on a couch and ate them slowly; 1 by 1, trying to focus on anything but the words cancer, chemo, bep, nausea, tired, why, (I can add in a couple swear words here), and pain. Eventually though I did think of something that helped me pass the next 30 minutes. Harry Potter probably saved my sanity that night:

You know how in the 3rd Harry Potter movie, when Professor Lupin's trying to teach Harry to conjure a Patronus charm, he has him think of a happy, strong memory to use in fighting the dementors? YEP, pulled a patronus and fought off my chemo side effects. The most damningly effective part of my support team was the fact that I knew they existed. So I zoned in on the happiest, strongest memory I could think of - it worked.

At this point it was 5:15 in the morning, I was exhausted and crawled into bed. I fell into a deep, somewhat relaxing trance-like state. I figured I'd need whatever creativity I had left in me to tackle Day 7... because I knew this one wasn't over, not by a long shot.

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