Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by jakethorn on July 14, 2008 - 1:15pm

Tags:

• personal

Just a bare-bones update this time. I didn’t journal for a few days because they were shitty and I wasn’t up to it. A couple of them involved fevers. Lots of nausea. The odd throwing up of a meal. You know, the usual.

This time was a little different in that I was going a little stir-crazy from the drugs. Two of the chemo drugs I was on explicitly mentioned the possibility of mental side effects (hi-lo stuff) and another drug I’m on, Prednisone, is famous for messing with your head. Add to that the regular shitty side effects of chemo on top of the fact that I thought I was going home for 10 days, NOT getting blasted with poison, the sheer amount of time I've been stuck in here, and you had a recipe for ... what I was late last week into the weekend.

I feel much better now. The numbers say I’m winning. That’s not to say I’ve won, but the indicators the doctors use to see how the lymphoma is behaving look good ("LDH levels" for anybody who wants the lingo). There’s a possibility that I may have only one round of chemo left before we go to the bone marrow transplant phase. Not that that’s a piece of cake; the BMT is apparently like 30 days of chemo... same side effects, all hospital-time, treated like a fragile infant. It’s the equivalent of completely trading out immune systems, destroying all the remnants of mine and replacing it with my little brother’s. We’ll see. I have a bad feeling about it, but that’s probably just because I haven’t read enough yet. Everybody around me seems to think it’s a grand idea. Either way, I feel like I’ve turned a corner. I have timetables. I like timetables, even flimsy ones.

On the colitis front, I continue to lose and lose. I sleep in 2 or 3 hour chunks if I’m lucky and sometimes I’m very unlucky. This is certainly the worst flareup I’ve ever had to deal with. The last two days have been slightly better, but I don’t expect it to last at all. It’ll be back to its worst as soon as I start the next round of chemo, possibly sooner if I decide to push my weight. My weight, by the way, dipped all the way to 56.4 kg, which I’m not sure what that is in pounds, but I know I don’t want to know. The next few days I’m going to try to rebound, which might mean eating stuff that’ll worsen my colitis, but I’m used to having to make that trade, so whatever.

Today’s the first day in a few I’ve felt good enough to write. That means this is a good day. I wish they were all like this.