Broken Doll

Rant rant rant.

I am trying to be upbeat about this more often than not but it is really wearing thin. Yes there are good things. My liver enzymes are back to normal. This will almost certainly not kill me. But I am really fucking sick of:

• feeling like shit all the time. I feel achey. I am tired. Walking the three blocks from the El to my office wears me out to the point of breathing hard. Yesterday I unpacked a single small box into a drawer, and had to fecking lie down afterward.
• it takes longer and longer to recover. A week at first. Then 10 days. Then 12. I get two lousy days of feeling somewhat like normal. The entire week of work after treatment sucks because I feel constantly sick, even if it’s a low-grade thing rather than an acute thing. I am scattered and can’t focus. I lose track of things. I feel like I can’t keep up. I want to lie down.
• side effects. Constipation (magnesium salt laxatives are vile). My hunger mechanism broke two weeks ago so I might get hungry when I need food, or I might simply get queasy (a sure-fire way to encourage me to eat, right). Nosebleeds. And its own separate bullet point…
• hair loss. At this moment in time I’m all pissed off because I cut my hair short because they told me my hair would go all at once. It did not, and now I feel like I will never quite be able to tell when it shows, when it’s time to break out the wig, because I can’t see the back of my head. Does it look thin now? I can’t even tell. And I HATE myself in short hair. I see photos of myself and don’t even recognize me. That’s not who I am. Oh, and I’m losing hair in other places too, which makes me feel weird.
• I want a fucking salad. A huge one in a bowl bigger than my head. I want raw produce. I want to eat strawberries and blueberries and cherries and all the really good summer produce I’m going to miss out on because eating it raw carries too high an infection risk with my compromised immune system. Cooked squishy vegetables are disgusting. I never want to see another bowl of soup as long as I live. Canned fruit sucks.
• I haven’t exercised in weeks, because I’m too sick to. It makes me feel fat. My only consolation here is that the weight gain vs. weight loss side effects of the two different chemo drugs are apparently balancing each other out, and I remain more or less stable. What’s not cool is “stable” still contains the 15 pounds I gained over the winter holidays. So, technically, I am fat and can’t do a damn thing about it for the forseeable future.
• I have at least two months of this left to go, and probably four. If I’m this frustrated now, what’s it going to be like in four months?

I want to be done with this. I hate it. It’s debilitating and it gets in the way. It’s fucking ENDLESS and it’s sucking up an entire year of my life.

Fuck cancer. Fuck chemo. Fuck being sick.

…which, ironically, upsets me a bit because it has taken this long to get here. Twelve days. I have today and tomorrow to enjoy this before I go back to chemo and start all over again. And “enjoy” might be a bit of a stretch since I have so much shit to do, and increasingly fewer days in which I feel good enough to do them.

But I am incredibly grateful — I am pain-free. I remember a time just a few months ago when I worried that I would never again know what that felt like. And it feels good. And I’m so happy about that. There is only that weird static-like not-quite-painful sensation that comes on during the ten-to-twelve days after chemo. There are no words to describe that. It’s not exactly pain, not exactly nausea, and “discomfort” is just too vague. I can’t even think of anything to compare it to — it’s like nothing else I’ve experienced. How to get people to understand what that feels like… how much it cripples me in small, subtle ways? I can’t.

But every once in a while I do notice the lack of pain. You become so used to thinking of painlessness as the default that you forget that it feels like anything. You don’t notice. But I do.

I met a man today who, in the past 15 years, has gone from average college kid, to instant millionaire, to destitute and homeless, and back again. He is smart as hell, savvy, honest, and articulate. There are depths to be plumbed here, some lesson somewhere to be learned, I sense. There is more to know and it is somehow relevant to now — this time, this place in my life. I just don’t know how, yet.

And then there is this (from my single bloggy fan), which also seems relevant, somehow tied in. I read it and my mind instantly connected the two. I have some sense of a cosmic hand setting pieces in place. The domino effect will come later.

I hope I get to talk to him again. There is more to know… something I need to know.

Tired but feeling better about myself. I am glittery and decorated too. Going through chemo my body goes through all these changes; I feel gross and ugly. My hair is short and thin — like a baby’s hair. It is nice to have a moment to remember and feel that my beauty, my sensuality, my sexuality, my worth and my sacredness are still in me, even if difficult for me to find right now.

Jenn is wonderful. Reminds me that I’m beautiful. Much of the time nowadays I don’t feel like I am. It is nice to hear.