The new me, minus hair and moustache courtesy of the ABVD chemotherapy protocol.

Shaved

Well, I finally got tired of my scruffy, scrawny, inadequate chemo hair and shaved the whole works off. I shaved off the wretched remains of my moustache yesterday, and my hair today. I actually had a lot of hair left, or at least that's the impression that the mass of hair in the sink gave me, but spread it out over my scalp and it probably doesn't amount to much.

Now my head is cold!

7-Down

I'm back from my seventh chemo treatment. I guess it was successful in that it made me feel like I'd been lightly beaten with clubs, ruined my appetite, and turned my urine a bright, sinister red color, the color of the Kool-Aid man's lifeblood. They also adjusted the copay for Neulasta, so now on top of being a pain in the bone marrow, it makes my bank account squeal. Yowzah! Still, I guess my life is worth at least that much money. (It sounds like the premise for a TV game show in a country with a large population and high unemployment - How Much Is Your Life Worth? Where host Dink Martinsyde offers you increasingly large sums of money to kill yourself in various ways, such as eating egg salad sandwiches continuously until your body rejects mayonnaise and you perish in a greasy emulsion. "Is your life worth SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS?" "Hell no!" "Well then, rub garlic toast on your scalp until you wear a hole through your skull!" Sort of like Most Extreme Elimination only without the Safety Fluid.)

Nodal sclerosing Hodgkin's, by the way, in case anyone's wondering. My "signature" in the lymphoma community would be something like "Hodgkins NS4E". But I checked my last remaining node in my groin last night (which sounds like a seventh grader's coded reference to self-stimulation (he said stimulation, a-huh-huh-huh)) and found it much reduced in size and much softer than before. I think it's about to go the way of the do-do and the carrier pigeon, and I couldn't be happier. I'm still a little scandalized by the hulking copay, but I'll get over that on my own. Cancer is something I can't get over on my own.

Chop This

I didn't have a use for the show Chopped on the Food Network. I don't think culinary competition shows really work in any substantial sense to begin with, and I think there are already way too many culinary competition shows as it is. But as dubious as I was about Chopped in the beginning, I have to say, it's set new lows for foodie pretentiousness. "What we have here is an egg-rolled chimichurri apricot sauce with wino loins lightly pan-fried in a combination of butter and plutonium, with serried slaw and squid hearts basted with titmouse entrails and whale blubber..."

Knock it off already, Pierre, it's a fricking sandwich.

A Lesson

I'm at the halfway point in my chemotherapy, and I've learned one thing. If you can possibly not work while doing chemo, don't! This chemo-and-work stuff is for the birds and I only do it out of economic necessity. If I didn't need the money, I'd stay home.

It isn't that chemo leaves one feeling too bad to work, though it does leave one feeling bad. The main problem is that chemo is highly inconvenient. I don't want to gross anyone out, but the blunt fact of chemo (or my chemo, anyway) is that it's dangerous to be more than a minute or two away from a bathroom at any given time. The moment the urge to go the bathroom hits, you'd best beat feet and get to the bathroom because you've got about sixty seconds before the mere urge turns into a quite uncontrollable expulsion.

I used to travel to work pretty light, with everything I wanted in my pockets (phone, iPod and keys, and that's about it). Now I travel with a fairly large canvas bag that contains my chemo road kit. Pills of various sorts, some prescription and some not. Hard candy for when I get sick of the "chemo aftertaste." A sweater for when I get too cold. Suitable lunch products, usually soup and a can of soda. Gatorade. And down in the very bottom of the bag, spare clothes for when one can't get to a bathroom in time and there is An Official Problem.

Usually when that happens I just go home, because changing clothes alone isn't enough. But at least a fresh change of clothes permits one to assume a guise of public respectability long enough to get to the car.

Yes, chemo is very inconvenient. Lunch becomes problematic, because you have to settle, every day, the question "Is thinking about food going to make me sick?" If you drive anywhere, you had best know where the convenience stores are on the route because you may need their bathrooms. There are certain days where leaving the house for any reason at all is a bad idea. And the hell of it is that even on the days when I know it's going to be difficult (the Friday after chemo being the worst) I still have to go to work.

I'm not complaining - not really. I'm just saying that if you don't have to work during your chemo, do yourself a favor and don't try. I've been doing it for three months and it just isn't worth it. The stress alone is more than I can stand some days. But I guess that's the true definition of a wage slave, when you need the money so bad you have to work through the messy sticky horror that is chemotherapy.

But it beats dying. Doesn't it?

Whoops

I was supposed to go to the pulmonologist (?) on the 23rd to have a breathing test done. There's nothing particularly wrong with my breathing, except for how heavy is sounds over the phone when I call at two in the morning.

No, seriously, there's nothing wrong with my breathing, but one of my chemo drugs can cause breathing problems in a certain percentage of patients. So my oncologist, diligent to the end, scheduled me a breathing test for the 23rd. So yesterday I drove to the office and presented myself to the receptionist, eager to get my breathing test out of the way so I could go back to work, or go to the dentist, or just go back home, or something.

The receptionist said "You're a little early, inasmuch as the 23rd is next Monday."

Crap! These appointments, they run together on me!

Doctor's Orders

I am under strict doctor's orders not to trim any trees.

I've been trying to bring order out of chaos, or at least beat back the enormous overgrowth of brush on our property. I feel that I share that with George W. Bush, who also spent a lot of time "cutting brush". Anyway, I managed to get myself fairly scratched up and bruised up while cutting the most recent load of brush.

Since I started chemo I bruise easily, and I bruise oddly. My normal bruises are just that, normal-looking ovoids, but bruises while one is in chemo have a strange spidery aspect. They look like the ships the Shadows flew in Babylon 5, only irregular and misshapen. Anyway, while the esteemed Dr. Adoo was feeling for nodes and listening to my lungs, he noticed the mess that is my forearms, and sternly ordered me to avoid such hijinks in the future.

Never one to take the doctor's orders lightly, I have vowed to avoid any kind of manual labor at all and will spend the next three months assembling 1/72nd scale model airplanes in front of the TV.

He, like I, was unable to feel any swollen nodes. He's pleased with my progress, and as I said elsewhere, anything that pleases my oncologist is liable to tickle the sh** out of me. And now, back to my model airplanes!

Monstervision

Who here remembers that underrated comic genius, Joe Bob Briggs? He used to have a show on one of those early cable super-channels called Monstervision, where he acted as the host for the crappy monster movie du jour. It was sort of like Mystery Science Theater 3000 in overall feel, in that his role was to mock the movie as much as it was to host it. (Once Joe Bob ran for President on what he called the "condom ticket". His stump speech was pretty simple: "I may not be much fun right now, but if you don't use me, you're liable to be in for a nasty surprise later.")

At the end of each movie he had the "Drive-In Totals", where he counted up occurences of various things. Numbers of dead bodies, numbers of gratuitously-displayed dead insects, instances of defenestration, whatever. At the end of each list he would note various acts of -fu, there -fu was meant to demonstrate possession of masterly skill in whatever was being referenced. There was chain saw-fu, chair-fu, Dustbuster-fu, and presumably such things as spaghetti-fu, infrared guidance-fu, and distillery-fu.

With the gone-but-not-forgotten Joe Bob Briggs as my model, I now wish to compile the Drive-In Totals for my most recent chemotherapy, which was so recent that my urine still had the bright red color of Adriamycin.

Bags of fluids: four
Enormous syringes: one
Large syringes: three
Lesser syringes: three
Neulasta syringes: zero
Trips to men's room with IV stand in tow: one
Gratuitous naps: two
Port-fu
Magazine-fu

Debling

Guy Fieri always talks on the Food Network about how he has to "de-bling" to do certain cooking tasks. I wish I could de-bling in the sense of throwing him the hell off the TV so I can watch a cooking show without having to put up with him. Gawd.

I think that show "Drive-ins, Diners and Dives" is one of the most annoying things I've ever seen on the Food Network. How many times do we have to repeat the scene of Guy shoving something down his well-muscled throat and mumbling "That's super-tender" or "that's money" or "that's off the hook" before projectile vomiting sets in? Arrrgh. I'm so sick of him the mere sight of bleached spiked hair, pinkie rings, or sunglasses worn on the back of the head are enough to send me scuttling for the exits.

There is a certain population that thinks that Rachael Ray is the most irritating thing since jock itch. Well, she doesn't have anything on Guy Fieri, and that's money. And is it just me, or does he sound just like Emeril when he shouts? What if he really is Emeril? What if Emeril decided to retool his career by dressing and acting like an overbearing guitarist for a shit garage band? We'd have to say "BAM! Bad career move, Emeril! BAM!" And that is money.

Portnoia

I'm paranoid about my port.

I should explain. I had an access port to my heart installed before I started chemotherapy, partly because it makes access to my bloodsteam easy and convenient, and partly because some of the chemo drugs are so toxic they would destroy ordinary veins that they were injected into. What the port amounts to is a rubber bulb implanted just below the skin on my right pectoral muscle. It feels about like an enormous nipple mounted about three inches above and one inch inboard of the genuine article. From this rubber bulb extends a piece of plastic tubing that goes about halfway up my neck before entering my jugular vein and then proceeding down again and terminating just shy of the heart valve.

What it amounts to, really, is a sort of faucet tapped right into my heart, for good and bad. If allows quick access for chemo, and it allows the chemo drugs to mix with 100 mile per hour bloodflow that prevents the drugs from burning out my veins. But I'm also paranoid. I don't mind the dogs crawling all over me, but not on my upper right quadrant, where the port is. I don't even like to scratch itches in that part of my body. I usually have a fairly relaxed attitude toward my body - I'm the sort of person that finds arterial bleeding "kind of interesting" because how often does one get to see blood squirt? But my port could bleed me out in a matter of a few minutes if something went haywire, and I can never really get that thought entirely out of my head.

It doesn't help that as I lose weight it becomes more and more noticeable. The plastic tubing is clearly visible under my skin, and the port itself seems to grow as my subcutaneous fat slowly disappears. The surgeon that put it in claimed that many people never have any problems with their ports at all and often leave them in for years. I'll accept that the vast majority of ports never cause any problems, but I'm so anxious about mine that I really doubt I'll consent to leaving it in any longer than absolutely necessary.

I guess it's a sign of my increasing ability to withstand chemo in general that subsidiary issues like my port suddenly become Big Damn Deals. And no, I don't feel any better these days. Chemo still sucks. But I'm losing the memory of what it feels like to feel halfway decent and to have a digestive tract that works. I'm finding chemo somewhat easier to deal with physically simply because I'm coming to accept it as normal. I still get depressed sometimes, and I still want to know what I did to deserve all of this, but since I can't remember what it feels like to feel good, I accept feeling bad as inevitable. The dreadful Bookstore Incident doesn't even humiliate me any more; it was just another day in that wonderful paradise that we call chemo.

Nasal Hair

All of my nose hair has fallen out. Sounds pretty funny, doesn't it? Might even sound convenient. But without nose hair, my nose constantly oozes. Constantly. And without nose hair to trap warm air, my nostrils are constantly ice cold, like I'm camping out in the middle of some icy Finnish forest. I'm tempted to tape a piece of flannel to my nose just to keep it warm. I thought about trying to shove absorbent thingamabobs up my nose, but the only things that seemed close to the right size were cigarette filters, and even though I haven't smoked in almost two years, it still seems unwise to tempt fate by putting anything to do with cigarettes up my nose.

In the immortal word of Professor Lupin, "Riddikulus!"

That Time of Year

It's that time of year again, the time when the evening air is heavy with the scent of orange blossoms. I love the scent of orange blossoms and I'm prone to thinking that it is perhaps the perfect aroma. It seems that the aroma of orange blossoms never fails to make me feel a little better no matter what sort of bleak nonsense is going on in my life. Colon dying as a result of chemotherapy? Well, here, have some orange blossom. It helps.

It really does. There are certain scents that I really like. I used to be quite the Polo man, for example, in my twenties. I didn't wear Polo every day, but usually every Friday I'd splash some on, and I'm still quite fond of the smell. Later I decided that I liked Lagerfeld Photo more than Polo, but these days, I'm not so sure - they're both pretty nice, even though they're probably both quite passe. Mind you, I'm not the sort of man who has any business wearing Polo or Lagerfeld any more. I'm neither young nor vigorous, and these days I have more use for a good hand sanitizer than I do a good cologne.

Maybe if they made Polo-scented hand sanitizer I would be in business! As it is, you can tell when I'm close at hand by the scent of Purell on the breeze.

There are several women's perfumes that I like, but I'm really hopeless at remembering their names. I remember Chanel Number Five only because Channel Five used to be an independent TV station in Phoenix that aired, among other things, Action Theater, World Beyond, and The Wallace & Ladmo Show. Perry Ellis is one that I like, but I can't actually remember what it's called. It's "Perry Ellis's Something-Or-The-Other" but I can't remember what. Perry Ellis's Pancreas, I don't know. I also like Red, but I think it's Someone-Or-The-Other's Red, isn't it? I don't remember. Otto von Bismarck's Red, maybe.

But it's sad. As I sit here and think about colognes and perfumes, I can't remember how anything smells except for the weird metallic taste/smell that one of my chemo drugs gives me. I can't even remember what orange blossoms smell like. I just remember that I like it. Being sick is such fun sometimes!

But hey, at least I can't remember what burning rubber smells like either! It's not all bad!