"Anti-nasea pills? We need no stinkin' anti-nausea pills!" said the shaman.
Yikes! that was a wrong idea. I was feeling so good after dinner last night, I figured I was past the worst of it.
I had 2+ hours of . . . well, as with all this stuff, it ain't what you're used to. Yeah, you could call it nausea, but it wasn't. Let's call it what it is: chemical poisoning.
I never felt like hurling, and it was not positional. Normally movement makes it worse. Compared to normal nausea, this was far less acute, but much more gnawing. There was also a burning sensation that wasn't heartburn but could have been. That's what's so unique about this whole chemo thing. It's a whole new set of maladies and sensations wrapped up in familiar terms.
Eventually, I looked at the clock and 2 hours had gone by, and I knew I'd dropped off. We won't be making that mistake again.
This AM, I'm up and feeling fairly normal again.
Shaman, you are an inspiration to me, and I suppose, others here on the fire. I continue to pray for you and your family and feel blessed to be this close to you as you wind your way through life the the curve balls it throws.
Thanks. However, I must say the idea of being inspirational sounds somewhat beyond my sensibilities right now.
I suppose there is a choice in all this, and that I'm making the noble choices. However, the alternatives are far more painful. Heck, they don't even think of this as a particularly deadly cancer. It grows fast. It insinuates into all sorts of places is shouldn't, but as a man-killer, it kind of sucks. There is no Stage 4 version of this crap. If I'd wavered a week or a month or even just grabbed a bottle of Scoresby and said, "Enough!" All I'd have had to look forward to was like the lawn equivalent of crabcrass, and I'd have spent years trying to actively dissipate myself to the point of extinction. I've actually known a few folks who did that sort of thing, and they ended up far more miserable in the long run. It may be counterintuitive, but I'm just being lazy.
I met up with one of them while I was going through the Left Nut Job. He was in the parking garage. 10 years ago, he was chain smoking and going through a half-gallon of Wild Turkey a day, and claiming he'd live forever. He finally had his heart stop so many times, they finally convinced him he might have something wrong with him. Even this bastard finally figured out it was easier to get with the plan than deal with the consequences.
As to last night's bit of entertainment, I chose to lay off the anti-nausea pill at bedtime, because I wanted to reduce the risk of constipation. Those pills really shut things down.
