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I haven’t put a song up here in awhile, so I thought I would again. I was looking through my record collection for a good song to sing at the Connie-a-thon on Saturday. This one seemed fitting – try it on.
We have no right to ask when sorrow comes, “Why did this happen to me?” unless we ask the same question for every moment of happiness that comes our way. ~ Author Unknown
Courtney, my friend with breast cancer, had her, I believe, 3rd chemo treatment yesterday. She goes down to a fancy-shmancy cancer center at Northwestern University for her chemo. As I understand it, she gets her own room and a nice view of the lakeshore out the window. Which sounds nice, I guess, but I imagine all she wants to do is hurl, anyway. Chemo does the same thing there as it does here. I suppose I regret a little bit that she’s not getting the great people watching that comes with community chemo (where everyone is all in one room), but she’s probably better off. You can compare my chemo experience to being a patient in M.A.S.H., and her’s to being a patient in Grey’s Anatomy. Well, either way, she’s still gonna want to puke, so what’s the difference (says the M.A.S.H. patient)?
She’s having many of the same problems I had when I went through chemo, and I think it’s nice for both of us to commiserate about it.
As I suspected, she’s a pretty tough chick.
Well I can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any sense to me either. I guess I do remember talking to one survivor that said that after treatment she felt suddenly thrown out on her butt. I don’t really feel like that. And I don’t miss the drugs, that’s for certain. Or sitting around doing nothing. Or the fear that I might die. Or the smell of it all.
And this is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I can’t help but find myself looking back on chemotherapy with a sort of shuttering fondness. It wasn’t fun, but it was purposeful. And I got to watch a lot of CSI.
Ok, maybe it’s just the CSI episodes that I look back on fondly.
Whoa, the steroids. I forgot about them. No, they were awful.
I had a check-up this morning with my Doc and my oncology nurse. It was much of a check up, really. It was more of a…
“How are you?”
“Good. How are you?”
Good.”
“Good, nice seeing you.”
“Yep, see you later.”
As if my doctor and I were passing in a hallway. Which is stellar, because if I spent a long time talking to the guy, it’d probably mean something was wrong.
And I saw my nurse, and the other nurses. She “flushed” my port again, and this time I didn’t mind the smell or the taste so much. I didn’t really even notice the taste, come to think of it. She said she saw me in the paper yesterday, in the article about the Connie-a-thon that’s going on at Larkin High on Saturday.
They’ve hired me to play piano at a cancer survivor event in June, so we talked a little about that.
I think I’ve transitioned fairly completely back to a regular life. I’m finding work and sleeping well. I’m planning that trip to Florida at the end of the month, and a trip to Indianapolis next weekend.
But I’m missing the feeling of purposefulness that I had during chemo. Everything else sucked, but in retrospect, it felt good to be fighting for something, and to have clear, concise, achievable goals. “I want to work” is about the best goal I can come up with lately. That’ll need to change.
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