Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Shaman after Chemo Camp

As many times I have poked at you over the years Shaman.
Hang in their old dude you can beat this and get some more years.
Like about 10 or more out of this stuff your going thru now.

Besides who else is gonna give ya thumbs down on your website to look forward too in the future but me???
👍👍👍😁😁😁

Many valuable lessons can be learned through what you share here - your attitude and fortitude as well as the way you share your experiences in the battle. You have my appreciation and admiration and, above all, my ongoing prayers for complete healing. Bless all pf those who are supporting you there. You can win this fight.

Continued best wishes!

Hang tough and keep the faith. Anyone fighting that battle, especially with such a great attitude, has my respect and admiration. I've seen firsthand what it entails.

Blessings upon you and yours.

Prayers for your recovery

I was draggin' ass, but I made it down to Chemo Camp-- dragged myself in and threw myself in the recliner.

They got me hooked up right away with a big carboy of saline. That's to help flush all the crap out.

They ran blood work-- everything is fairly normal.

So why am I feeling like worm slag?

Simple answer: You're having Chemo, dummy.

The guy next to me was a 4 bagger-- four bags hung on a double pole. He asked me what I was in for. I then made the mistake of asking why he was in-- Stage 4 esophageal that's already got into his brain. He was given 18 months 18 months ago. Yikes. That kills a conversation in a hurry.

One thing that is for-sure in this Chemo gig: there is no such thing as same-old/same-old.

Every day is a new discovery. Saturday, I was lying about in the recliner when my back seized up. The next 12 hours were simple agony. Mind you this was nothing a dose or two of Ibuprofen wouldn't have handled, but I'm off all that good stuff due to the blood thinners. NSAIDs would make me start bleeding at the pores. The only thing that worked was Oxycodone. The only thing I can think of was the spasms were caused by the fact I've been laid up in that damn recliner since 15 March for one reason or the other. I had my last dose of the OXY at midnight Sunday and spent all of yesterday slowly coming out of the fog.

I'm now on my last week of rest before starting Round 3 of Chemo Camp.

Hang tough, Shaman. We're pulling for you.

When I went through it in my early 40's,the drag-ass'n wasn't so bad.
What got me was the nausea. I spewed like a hot beer. Good luck Shaman.
I've felt your pain.

Cancer fuuuucking sucks.

Hang in their Shaman.
Beat this crap and get another decade at least.
👍👍👍

More Prayers.

Shaman, you have what they call, "Guts".

I'm not so sure I'd call it that. In some ways, I'd call it basic laziness. That is, I'm trying to get rid of the cancer with the least muss and fuss possible. This particular cancer has a tendency to attack kidneys and lungs next, and both are horrible ways to go.

The French had a term for battlefield grit: cran. Cran was what the French soldier had in excess of all other armies. Cran was was what would win the day. A belief in cran was probably the single biggest killer in WWI-- that and dysentery. In the end, they have the same basic components.

From the guy on the inside, I can tell you that I spend every day of Chemo Camp staring at people with gray faces under masks. In some cases, there is nothing under the mask. Some are coming in with walkers, some with wheelchairs. I don't see the bed-ridden ones. They're off in the main hospital. I come cake-walking in and say hello to nurses and take my recliner near the Pit of Oblivion, and I know that I'm probably in the safest chair in the world for me right now. I'm in the catbird seat.

On the other hand, there have only been a very few places which have evoked a gut-wrenching existential reappraisal in my life. One was the holding tank at the Hamilton County Jail. Another was realizing I was going to be flooded in under Fischer Ridge and might end up feeding the cave crickets. A third was the night I agreed to party with the Freshman Mortuary College students. Sitting your butt down in that recliner does have the same sort of ring to it.

BTW: Just in case you're wondering, the arresting officers and several other parties went to bat for me, and I got sprung from the lockup in just a few hours. I spent the latter part of the evening at La Normandie drinking scotch and eating onion soup. However, I still have this vivid memory of my fellow inmates in the holding pen. One was a hyperactive skinny white kid that had been busted on possession and the other was a mid-twenties black fellow with a serious attack of the 'Noids. He had found a corner of the pen and pulled his hoody around his head and drawn his knees up. He was the quintessential caged animal.

The teen kept up this constant drivel about how he had been picked up. It was insufferable. He finally got to jonesing on what was going to happen to him.

"So. . .like. . . when do they let you out, huh?"

The sullen black fellow who had been completely silent for an hour responded, "They don't."

That shut the white kid up, and we just sat on our concrete benches and waited.

Life comes at you fast. I went down to the hospital to visit my new Primary Care Physician. She's cool. She laughs a lot. I'm switching for a bunch of reasons, but the most ostensible one is that this doc specializes in treating the families of cancer patients. I did not know there was such a specialty. However, she's in the same office as my oncologist. I got out of there about 1000 and went home to my recliner.

Surprise! At 1300 I got one of those breathless emergency calls. The blood work I'd had that AM had come back. My platelets were dangerously low and I needed to come back in immediately. My red cells ain't doing so hot either, so I was tottering about. Like last time, they hung a bag of what looked like chicken soup along with a bag of saline and pushed them in over about an hour. I was back in my own recliner by 1600.

Is it true that what does not kill you makes you stronger? If anyone can answer that one it would be you...

Brought to mind some parallels with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. If you haven’t read this classic Shaman, I would recommend it.

Hang in tough!

Right now, I'd say that the premise is laughable. I have so few red blood cells that going down the hall to the bathroom has me completely gassed. I feel great, just lazing about in the recliner, anything else is a major effort.

I got weighed yesterday. I'm down to 281 from 312 less than a month ago. You can chalk most of that up to loss of appetite. Nothing sounds good, but luckily most things still taste good. My stomach is still in good form, I had a plate of lamb curry from the local Nepalese restaurant.

That’s a helluva way to lose weight. Hang in there.

Prayers for a complete recovery. Hang in there.