Thursday, July 23, 2009

My Latest Bullshit Theory

I feel terrible today. I felt terrible yesterday, but today I've felt easily as bad as during the darkest days of chemo. But I have a theory. It's probabl a bullshit theory, but a theory nevertheless.

We know that the cells that line the digestive tract suffer heavy damage from the act of digestion and tend to die off and reproduce with some haste. Most of the time, the cells are arranged in mixed generations so there isn't a massive die-off at one time; instead the cells croak a little at a time and the host never realizes what's going on.

But in my case, I think chemo wiped out most of my randomized generations of epithelial cells. I've got basically one generation, and when it dies off en masse, I go downhill. It's been about seven weeks from my last chemo, so I'm speculating that my epithelial cells tend to die every three and a half weeks. We'll see how I feel later in August and see if my theory is complete crap or not - or maybe by then the generations will have randomized sufficiently that I don't notice this sharp decay in how I feel.

I have a swelling in my neck. I found it the other night, and it scares me considerably. It feels just like a Hodgkins node, with one exception: it hurts when I press on it, which Hodgkins nodes (generally) don't do. I think it's just a muscle strained from moving all the gravel last weekend, or maybe I just hope it is.

I think I'm going crazy.

3 comments:

Stockyard Queen said...

Not crazy, just anxious, worried, stressed, and consequently maybe a little obsessive--in a good way? Hang in there, William. We all are hoping for the best for you.

William said...

Thank you, I appreciate that. Most of the time I'm okay, but every now and then it gets to me. It's like seeing glowing eyes just outside of the glow of the campfire - they could be anything, from rabbits to rabid bears. Do bears get rabies? Well, you know what I mean.

Stockyard Queen said...

I know, it comes in waves, usually when you least expect it and are not prepared to cope with it.