This blog is a confidant to hear my monologues and ease the emotional burden of my battle with cancer, sharing any doubts, confusions, fears or pessimism I don’t want to carry alone. For me, writing is almost like talking to a friend. It helps me cope. I don’t get feedback and support, and there is no warmth in the page glowing back at me, but I can much better put my feelings into words that don’t seem inappropriate or inadequate afterwards. If they do, I can always change them.
The blog is also a way of keeping my friends informed on my ups and downs, dishing out happiness when I’m doing well, and it’s an archive with better memory than me. It can serve its functions only if I post regular updates. Last week, I couldn’t. To serve the documentary purpose of this blog and to reassure those who’ve been waiting for updates with some degree of worry, here’s a chronology of the last six days.
On Monday, I woke up with the first hints of a diarrhea that became stronger during the couple of hours I spent at work before walking over to the hospital for a scheduled consultation with my oncologist. At his office, while we assessed the first chemo session – it went quite well, we agreed – nausea rose inside me. I filled the bag the quick-witted doctor handed me with the contents of my stomach, went home, and slept for the next twenty hours.
I retain no memory of Tuesday, which probably means I felt poorly and spent most of it in bed. I didn’t eat much and didn’t do much, besides feeble attempts at home office. At some point a parcel full of sweets arrived from a friend in Italy. It went unacknowledged until this morning. In the evening, I should have ridden my bike, but the trainer remained silent.
On Wednesday I had to get up for an appointment with my surgeon whom I expected to declare me a physically restored person, cycling, running, flying and all. To match the occasion, I felt much better. The surgeon looked at my scar with calm satisfaction. “You’re all good now”, she said, and I was free. Things were looking up again. I spent the rest of the day at work and the evening at a work dinner, mainly for the opportunity of eating good food without effort. This I did, though laboriously, slowly and without any enjoyment. My digestive system was still a bit cross with me.
Thursday was a normal work day, full of meetings, appointments and talks. I had still not fully conquered the diarrhea that had started troubling me on Monday, but its strength was on the wane. At night, I managed to pull a session on the trainer before good friends from college arrived for a short stay. The raclette I cooked up gave me much needed calories, and I eat with pleasure for the first time in days.
I had taken Friday off to be with my friends. We had breakfast in town, toured the place where I work and walked around Baden for hours celebrating our friendship. It was a great day. When they left in the late afternoon, I crumbled, out of nowhere. I felt exhausted as if I had shoveled coal for hours. My sense of duty to my body kept me awake through dinner, but by 9 I was gone, deep asleep until the next morning.
When I awoke on Saturday, I was almost as tired as the night before, struggling to rise from bed. Flucha went shopping with the children while I tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I had moments of elevated temperature, but the thermometer never gave me the reproducibility to justify a trip to the hospital. That night at eight, after the kids had flooded the bathroom as if were a rice paddy and had to go to bed without stories or songs as a consequence, I lay down and was soon asleep.
When I woke up, on Sunday morning shortly after three, the bed and my pyjamas were soaked. The bathroom scale later told me I had sweated out more than a liter. Something had been wrong but it was right now. I got up shortly after four, took a shower, had breakfast and made my way to the airport to travel to a conference whose attendance had hung in the balance until the very last moment. I felt energetic, strong, relaxed – as if nothing had ever been wrong.
0 comments:
Post a Comment