Got some pretty bad news from my doc today. My white blood cell count is way low, so they're putting me on antibiotics. No, that's not the bad news...the bad news is I have to eat two spoonfulls of yogurt with my antibiotics. I freaking hate yogurt. The doc said it, and I glanced at my wife who was shaking with laughter. I could have sworn she paid the doc to say it...but then again, I would respect any doctor who was taking low payouts to hilariously tell people they need to eat food they hate. Force a guy to eat some yogurt and make $20 on the side...respect.
I start my last marathon week today, and I couldn't be happier to get it over with. These marathon weeks are the worst, and by the end of this I should be absolutely dragging, so I'll try and blog each day this week to let people know how it's going.
Today, I went through my usual routine: go in, get my port accessed (read: stick a needle with a tube coming out of it in my chest and let me walk around with that thing dangling out for a while...like a car with its gas tank open), go to a small room and get my weight taken. They have this trick where, before they call the patient back, they set the scale to what your weight was the previous time. This allows you to know within a matter of seconds whether you've gotten fatter, which is nice. Today was weird...I actually lost weight from my last appointment. My wife confirmed how weird this was. "You've eaten nothing but cake this past week," she said. That was entirely accurate...in fact this morning, remembering my doc told me to eat something before chemo, saw the sheet cake (90% eaten by myself this past week) on the table. I quickly cut a piece and, knowing that the daycare kids would be arriving shortly and my wife would give me crap if she saw I was eating cake for breakfast, decided to eat it as quickly as possible. I cut off a huge bite, shoved it in my mouth and chewed it twice before I heard my mother-in-law say from behind me, "Cake for breakfast?" As I was explaining my orders to eat something, my father-in-law came up behind her. "Cake for breakfast?" Next, my wife came out of nowhere, before I even had a chance to swallow my bite. "Cake for breakfast?" Yes. And if we're being honest here, it's the third time in the past week I've done it (once with ice cream) and I still lost three pounds. Maybe I should start marketing a very specific diet...cake and cancer. Sure, it's a give-and-take type of diet, but it gets results. And it makes you feel like you're a 10-year-old living alone like the kid in "Blank Check."
I'm actually feeling pretty good starting my chemo today. I'm trying to start the week with a good attitude so by the time I get to Friday, and the then-25 hours I've spent having chemicals pumped into me, I'll hopefully still be clinging to a fraction of that enthusiasm and not want to just lie in bed and spend all my energy convincing my body not to get sick.
So, I'm preparing for war. I've got my laptop, some coffee, three seasons of "Breaking Bad" on my iPod, work I should get done for my full-time job, and homework I can always do for my EMT class.
For my EMT class, I showed up for my first ambulance shift yesterday wearing a plain, navy blue stocking cap approved by my instructor. On my first call, I impressed the paramedic I was riding with by, after providing care and during our transport back to the ER, engaged our patient, who was 90+, in a lengthy discussion about Canada, the midwest, agronomy and other random subjects. Once we got the lady in a room and situated, he complimented my bedside manner and what I did, but asked "what's up with the stocking cap?" I told him about my chemo and how I figured it didn't inspire confidence in patients to have a bald EMT student responding to help them. He laughed and said that as I long as I kept up a pleasant demeanor, they didn't care what we looked like. "Besides," he said, "look around." Every guy in the room was bald. I may have found the perfect part-time job for a bald dude, however I'll have to see how much cake the cafeteria has.
So, that's where I'm at right now. Five days of five-hour-per-day chemo sessions, then two weeks of the easy stuff - one chemo appointment per week (on Tuesdays) for about an hour, and then I'm done. I'll finish my chemo at the same time I finish my EMT class, and life will go from crazy to an absolute standstill - no appointments, no lab work, no class time, no clinicals. I'm not exactly one to just sit still, so I guess I'll have to find something else to take up my time. Maybe I'll get lucky and catch some other crazy disease. Or maybe I'll just learn Spanish. One of those sounds much more appealing than the other, but we'll see what happens.
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