Chemo is not as much fun as a crayon box full of bees

For the first time since I've started off my chemo treatment, I woke up a bit nauseous.

It could have been the fact I took an anti-nausea pill last night and went to bed at 9 p.m. It could have been the fact that I'm on chemo and spent each morning this past week having different cocktails of poison pumped into my veins. Or, it could have been the fact that last night I ate half of a large Papa Murphy's pizza, walked two miles and went to bed. I'm not a gambling man, so I won't make a wager on the true cause of my nausea, but I suspect it was going to bed early. I figured tonight I'll take an anti-nausea pill, eat half of a Virginia ham and go to sleep around midnight.

While feeling a bit nauseous this morning, it's actually not all that horrible. It's not exactly like when you're sick with the flu and just keep waiting to throw up...the feeling is constantly there, and it's more from weird stuff, like smells, that triggers the nausea. I can only assume this is what being pregnant is like, but saying "pregnancy is like having cancer" is a phrase that will be misread entirely and likely drop some jaws, so I'll avoid typing that again. I think pregnancy morning sickness could be similar to cancer, however, and that's a fair comparison that won't get me yelled at by every woman I know.

Really, more than the nausea is the monotony of all of this. It's the same routine every morning. Wake up, shower, throw on a T-shirt with a neck I don't mind getting stretched out, force myself to eat something, take my medications and drive 30 minutes to Ames. I check in (they know me by name now, like I'm some sort of chemo VIP), wait 5 minutes and I'm led back to a chemo dorm. They clean the spot around my port, stick me with a needle, we make small talk for 10 minutes and then they start pumping fluid into me for the next 5 hours while I do work on my computer. The smells, the sounds and everything are all intertwining into this big ball of monotony that is just entirely maddening.

Most people that know me well know that I can't handle being bored very well. When I was young, I doodled fairly frequently in class. To break monotony in fifth grade, I spent a recess period with an empty crayon box catching bees and putting them in the box. After I got about 30 of them into this 24-crayon pack that was about the same size as a pack of cigarettes, I closed the lid and brought them with into class. About 30 minutes into our lesson, I started getting bored and shook the box to hear the hum of 30 angry bees stuffed into a small container. The buzz kept growing, which started to concern me. My elementary school in Omaha, Neb. was growing quicker than facility upgrades could keep up, so my classroom was inside one of 30 portables - classroom trailers that were fairly quiet - around the main school. It was peaceful, secluded and easily disturbed by a crayon box full of 30 angry insects. I looked at my limited options - fess up and accept my punishment or release the bees and hopefully dilute the noise. I chose the latter, opening the lid slightly and casually tossing the box into a corner like a grenade. Within 15 minutes, the classroom was in chaos. Occasionally, a bee or two would get into the room and it would distract the students, who were all scared to death of the insects...this fear was amplified when they were required to sit in their desks. Thirty bees roaming a classroom, however, was too much for my teacher to handle. We were given recess and a janitor was brought in with a can of Raid and asked to find an explanation for why our classroom all of a sudden became a honey hole for stinging insects. To my knowledge, he never developed a hypothesis.

The bottom line is, when I get bored, I get somewhat mischevious. In elementary school, I entertained myself with doodling and odd habits. In high school and college I moved onto pranks.

Now, a 28-year-old adult, I know that pretending to fall asleep in my chair and slowly blowing up a surgical glove inside my shirt a little bit more every 10 minutes to make the nurses think my stomach is filling up with air, or chemo, or whatever is childish. I get that entirely, but that's kind of how I'm wired to behave. And when I'm stuck in a room for 5 hours each day with a variety of MacGuyver-like instruments, such as tongue depressers, cotton balls and Q-tips, my mischevious brain just starts pumping and I can't help but thinking about how great it would be to sneak a bird's nest into the potted plant in my room, leaving yet another person scratching their head about how something like that could have happened.

Chemo (and large helpings of pizza) seems to be effectively doing something to me physically, but it doesn't look like it's done much to curb my mischevious side. Let's hope that it does before I bring some red paint to dab on the ears of my nurse's stethoscope.

"Sally, are you bleeding from the ears?"