April Fool

Saturday morning
Isn’t it funny how, just when you think things are looking up a little bit, life just reaches out and gets hold of you and kicks you in the nuts, slaps you right back down, pees on your head as you crawl out of the hole. I made two HUGH (for Joe Kovacs, inside joke, thanks Heather) mistakes yesterday. First, I talked the doc into removing the PICC line from my arm; hey, we don’t really need it, it was convenient for the daily blood draw but we don’t do that anymore, and there is no chemo that will require it coming up. It came out easier than oiled spaghetti comes off your fork. Now I should be able to start golfing again, work out with a little vigor if I have any vigor, maybe even surf. Second, I planned a BBQ for next weekend to celebrate a little, say thanks a little.

In this part of Phase II I am getting chemo Tuesday and Friday, and blood tests on Friday. So I went in yesterday and we did the work, couple gutshots (needles in the stomach, very painless spot), blood draw, and then removed the PICC line. By the way I am renaming all chemo to be more patient oriented, so this is now numbmeup, makemepuke, makeredbloodcells and pumpupthejam. Anyways, I came home, went to see the matinee of the movie Robots with Mike, real clever movie. I came home to a message to call the Doc, my counts are in the toilet, I need transfusions, call him. I call him, and he says go to the hospital and get two units, all your counts are low, WBCs, reds, platelets. I asked how low, and he said real low. I asked if it was the chemo, and he said maybe, but we probably need a bone marrow biopsy on Monday. And here I was thinking how much I had been missing BMBs.

So I pack up the hospital kit for a six hour stay, two hours per unit of blood and two hours for paperwork, and drive over to French Hospital, five minutes away. I check in at 6pm, and they have me scheduled for a 23-hour stay. At that point I am cursing that we didn’t get the blood test results by noon, because then I could have gotten the 2 units in the doc’s office and been done by 5. They bring me into a room where some 29-year old is recovering from colon surgery. Same as when this started, only the guy was a lot older, bt colon surgery then too. There is a ten person We Just Had a Baby party going on in the corridor. Love those babies, all merconium and sputum. I can’t even see babies in a positive light at this point, how sad.

The nurse comes in after five minutes, and I ask her to put me in a room with no other people, I have low WBCs, I am neutropenic, so she goes to call the doc. Ten minutes later I am in the isolation room, double doors, one bed, similar to Stanford. Except nobody has ever been taught how to use an isolation room – they are leaving that up to me. Fun, thanks. Wait until they see my consultant fee, they won’t make that mistake again. I am just fortunate they had the room available; my guess is they use it only when someone wealthy requests a single, and have forgotten its intended use as an isolation unit.

Nurses come, nurses go. I need to make a parody of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

In the halls the nurses come and go,
speaking of reduced oxygen flow

As I reread this I realize I can’t parody it because it is too good; he yearns for a woman the way you end up yearning for life when it is threatened interchangeable, and he in fact compares the two:

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long
fingers,
Asleep...tired...or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here
beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the
strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and
fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
I have seen the eternal
Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

That was quite a digression, sorry. So, nurses come and go, and at 9pm they hook me up to the first unit. They are having a little crisis at the local blood bank getting O+, and this blood needs to be some special CMV irradiated stuff, hence the delay. So I am here for the night. Dana comes to visit at 10pm; she has been in Santa Barbara for the day with a friend, and thought I was just popping in for a couple shots of blood.

I am at my house as I write this. I left the hospital at 7:30 this am, WBCs are still in the toilet but I am safer here than there. I am trying to stay positive on this, but I am envisioning going back to Stanford and Phase I all over, Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Well, don’t panic until Monday afternoon. However, I am going to have to postpone that cookout for a month or so and see how this pans out. Grrrrrr.

Let me just vent this one thing, too. I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper, the Tribune, to point out that we were having a blood donation crisis. They couldn’t print this, but the other stuff they printed, like why did we need to have 3 garbage cans when one was good enough before (recycling you idiot). The inane tripe makes you wonder how humans got this far. Don’t they realize MY STUFF is the most important?

I envision the Pope taking Terri Schiavo to God’s favorite places in the cosmos, as a reward for waiting so long to finish the journey. That would be nice. Hence, today’s Eyebrow Lowbrow