Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by jakethorn on June 26, 2008 - 4:15pm

Tags:

• appreciation
• personal
• philosophy
• r2r

I had a couple horrible days but the last two I've been pulling out of it. Thanks again for being there for me, I feel all the warmth and even though I haven't been able to reply to everything, I'll never forget you and if you should ever find yourself in a situation like this, you can bet your ass I'll be there for you as well.

I was in a lot of pain Monday-Wednesday, being on the down side of the toughest round of chemo I'm likely to go through (or so my doctors tell me...hopefully they're correct). I've been hooked up to an IV machine for about 5 days. I hate having my mobility restricted like this, but that's just part of the process. I'm still getting my meals through a tube. That might change the next couple days, though... I'm going to try eating some chicken broth this afternoon and hopefully I'll be able to keep it down. If so, I can start moving back toward real food. I was vomiting a lot on Tuesday... pretty much hourly. Even drinking water would give me a cramp. There wasn't even anything to vomit, but I did anyway... mostly bile and acid. Nasty, nasty stuff. They weren't kidding when they told me I'd experience nausea with this treatment. It's all the worse because of my ulcerative colitis, which often serves as an extra trigger and leaves me weaker and more sleep-deprived than a typical chemo patient.

But I'm trying to soak up the experience the best I can so I might learn from it. One thing I want to talk about is how my growing understanding of how time works. Being able to live life on a month to month or year to year scale is such a luxury. Right now I'm living day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. On Tuesday for example, I had a miserable morning, then got a great pickup at night when my dad visited and Terese (one of my friends from Scripps) visited, and then deteriorated throughout the night, vomiting hourly until about 7 am (now Wednesday) when I was on the floor of the bathroom making shrieking noises as I vomited bile into the trashcan, and finally had to call the nurse to help me. Good times turn to terror so quickly. I hope I never forget that.

There's that famous quote, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." It's true, but what if you don't know if you'll see the end? What if you die in the third mile? What it tells me is that we have to learn to appreciate every step the best we can, no matter how much it may hurt sometimes, because you really never know. I'm trying my best to be strong and beat this thing, and I'm confident that I will, but there's no guarantee.

On Wednesday morning, right around when I was hitting my low point, I flipped on the TV in a desperate move to find something to take my mind off the pain. Surprisingly, I was rewarded with something really cool --- I found a channel that was broadcasting raw documentary footage of Big Sur. Nothing fancy --- just long, sweeping landscape shots set to soothing mood music. If you've ever been there, you know how beautiful the region is, and while the vibe can't quite translate to a little hospital TV, the images still brought back all these wonderful memories and feelings. Even though I was sitting in this in this hospital bed and had the taste of decomposing stomach acid in my mouth and knew full well that 30 minutes from now I'd be right back in the bathroom retching again, for that brief half hour or so, my mind was tuned to something beautiful. While I was watching, I got the idea to turn on my mp3 player and listen to some tracks I like, and between the audio and visual sensations, it made the time bearable... enjoyable, even. So even though I was in one of the toughest miles of what will (knock on wood) turn out to be one of the toughest journeys of my life, I was able to take a few good steps. That day may have been extremely hard on me, but at least I had that hour.

So to summarize, my life may really suck right now and I might even die, but I've learned a lot about appreciation and that's value nobody, no circumstances, no disease can take away from me. That's something I'll have as long as I have the will and the sense to hold onto it. I hope I never forget.