After a wonderful Tuesday, the week progressed in a terrifying way. On Wednesday and Thursday, I was out of energy again and confined to the sofa or the bed for long stretches of the day. I tried to get some work done but my brain wasn’t helping much. On Wednesday night, I had to give a presentation at a virtual conference organized by a large facility at the East coast of the US. Luckily it was only ten minutes. I did all right. Unfortunately, the conference was so interesting that I stayed up much longer than I had planned listening to the talks.
I’ve spoken before about the feeling of being out of energy. It seems to me that this time is different. It’s not just out of energy. I feel almost lifeless. I lie in bed wondering how (and for how long) things will continue. I don’t feel strong pain, but there’s diffuse pain in my lower back that certainly contributes to how poorly I sleep at night. I’ve tried fighting back with painkillers but paracetamol is no good, and ibuprofen makes me sweat like crazy when I pop the pill in the middle of the night.
I wrote in the previous post that I assumed the sweating had to do with the immune system finally doing its job and getting all pumped after the ovid shot. This hypothesis fell apart when essentially the same thing happened the next couple of nights. I pop an ibuprofen. The pain goes away quickly. I fall asleep happily, only to awake in a pool of sweat a few hours later. Flucha found an explanation only about dilated blood vessels and such, but to me it makes little sense that a drug that’s supposed to lower your temperature makes you sweat like a sauna.
Besides the back pain, there’s pain in my abdominal region. It’s much more disturbing though it’s not very strong and doesn’t bother me much physically. It’s where the cancer would cause pain if it were growing. I am currently on chemotherapy, though I’m not taking any pills at the moment. I’m in the second recovery week of the first Lonsurf cycle. Has the drug helped at all? It’s easy to think it hasn’t. There are scratches on my left side, halfway up my torso. There are bites on my right side and sharp claws making a mess with my insides in between. It’s as if there was a rodent living inside me. In all likelihood, it’s the cancer, and it’s making itself felt.
I don’t know this, of course. It would take a CT to see what’s really going on. But when I listen inside me, what I hear doesn’t give me much room for interpretation. It fills me with negativity. The current therapy is the last one in the books. What if it doesn’t work? What are the steps for me after that? Do I just wait and watch myself being eaten from the inside? What happens when the liver fails?
I walked to town today to pick up a prescription. This little walk, not even four thousand steps, was already too much for me. The miserable weather didn’t help, but it wasn’t the cause either. I had experienced something similar when my lung was full of water. I had to stop and rest at the train station before I could make my way back. This time is different. I’m still short of breath and wouldn’t want to climb 200 steps, but stairs were not a particular problem. Everything was a problem. I simply didn’t have the power. I was reaching my limits of performance. At the pharmacy I was grabbing the counter like an anchor to hold myself upright and give me some energy for the way back.
Life is draining from me. This spring (or summer, if I make it that far), I won’t be pulling a trailer with two kids along the river in search of a picnic spot or a place to swim. I won’t even be riding behind Flucha doing the pulling, though the speed would be much more moderate, laughable even for my former self. I’m not my former self anymore.
My heart rate used to be in the forties when I was in the shape of my life. My rather sedentary lifestyle in London had taken this up to 60, which is normal. When I was last in the hospital, for the bacterial infection in my bloodstream, I clocked in at nearly 90, resting in bed. The other day, I measured more than a 100. What is my heart racing to achieve? How can I live like this?
Life is about enjoyment, about having good times, about having fun. I’ve hardly had a drop of alcohol since before Christmas. I drink very little coffee. It’s not that these things make me feel worse. They just don’t give me any pleasure anymore. I don’t enjoy the taste anymore. The moment to take up cigars has definitely passed. Life is no fun anymore.
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