Colostomy bags are Buddhist

Who I am

One of the things I've discovered about being a cancer patient is that it becomes your identity: mcarp, cancer patient. When you're in chemo, chemo is the dominant factor in your life. Everything else revolves around it.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I sometimes go for days without bathing. Part of the reason for this is that the mere act of taking a shower is so physically draining I have to sit or lie down for twenty minutes afterward. Anything that involves more than two or three minutes of activity is going to require a rest period afterward.

I've had a bit of normalcy during my three-week 'chemo vacation', but only a bit.

As I've mentioned before, I take chemo on alternating Mondays, with a portable pump that continues to drip 5FU into my system for 48 hours afterward. Then I remain sick with various side effects for days.

When I first started chemo, I got five 'good days' between my every-other-week fill-ups. Then it dropped to four days, then three. Now I have no good days. I remain nauseated the whole time. Sensitive to cold the whole time. Fatigued the whole time. Having intermittent tingling of the fingers and toes the whole time. (The tingling is the part that seems to most concern my oncologist; the chemo I'm receiving can cause permanent numbness and nerve damage in the extremities.)

I was pretty much a slob before I got sick. Now, I'm even worse. But I don't have the energy to be otherwise.

Chemo update: shrinking tumors, deteriorating mind

I'm past due for another update.

I have completed 11 of 12 scheduled chemotherapy cycles. The doctor had to delay the twelfth because my immune system is finally so shot I can't handle another dose. I've taken three weeks off from chemo, and I'll go back in next Monday to see if I'm in good enough shape to resume. If so, they'll hook me up for the twelfth dose then.

I had a third CT scan at the end of July. Good news: the chemo is working. I'm a little confused by what the oncologist told me, but either one or two of the tumors on my liver have disappeared. The largest one has shrunk significantly, and another has shrunk as well.

Here's where I'm confused. The first scan revealed three tumors, and the second confirmed that. The third scan shows either one or two tumors, and I didn't get the inconsistency until after I left the doctor's office. In any event, I'm making progress against a disease that at this point in my treatment has already killed about a third of the people who get it.

Again, complete recovery from Stage IV colon cancer is almost unheard of. It's a fraction of a percent of all cases. I'm not expecting complete recovery, only to buy as much time as I can get for myself before it kills me. That could be years from now, and I hope it is.

But in other respects, things are not going well. Even I can see the deterioration in my mental and emotional state. I spend day after day holed up in my house, seeing nobody. I sleep in the clothes I wear. I sometimes go for days without bathing.

If you've seen The Lazy Song alternate video by Bruno Mars — the one featuring Leonard Nimoy — it's quite similar to the way I live my life. Except for the bathrobe.

 

The house looks as bad as it's ever looked. In some respects, it's worse. There are styrofoam cups from Braum's everywhere. I've been living on milk shakes for weeks now, because they're one of the few things that still have any taste. Of course, foam beverage cups are huge space consumers, in or out of the trash can. And they're everywhere in here.

Before I learned that my tumors were vanishing, I had been psychologically preparing myself for imminent death. I knew I would make it through the end of the year, and probably next year as well. But after that, things seemed bleak, and I was training myself to not care. And it was working.

The house is full of fruit flies, by the way. They're everywhere.