That's Done

The second round of ESHAP chemo is done, and it was... well, bad. I expected it to be bad, and it didn't disappoint. The Vesuvian diarrhea that could well have killed Pliny the Elder if he wasn't already dead, the bizarre mental disturbances, the racking pain, oh yes, we had it all, plus truly delicious few days spent throwing up all of my internal organs and eroding sores in my mouth with stomach acid. I was pretty sure that I was going to want to keep that thing that looked like a pancreas, but too late, I flushed the toilet too soon. Once I took a Percocet and about thirty seconds later threw up. Not one to waste a waterlogged if perfectly useable pain pill, I strained it out with my fingers and saved it for later. This anecdote may lack the clear coherence and drama of Caesar's dispatches from Gaul, but it's the best I could do given my circumstances.

Does anyone know what a pancreas looks like? My understanding of what innards look like comes from the old Visible Human model, where I think with reasonable artistic license I painted the pancreas sort of a pale yellow color. In practice, I imagine most internal organs look reddish, gristly, and unappealing.

Now that I'm starting to recover from chemo, I'm fricking starving, but not very much sounds very good yet. Other than a couple of oranges and some bottles of Ensure, I haven't eaten much of anything in a week. I'm tired of the overly rich chocolate flavor of Ensure and sometimes when you're on chemo it has a peculiar slimy consistency that is most unappealing, but I found that if I didn't drink an Ensure once a day, I tended to get really weak and lightheaded.

Here's a statement from the Surgeon-General: taking a pain pill again that you've already thrown up once will produce an aftertaste in your mouth that will crush your soul for weeks.

So back to my point. What should I eat now that I think I actually CAN eat a little bit? There's a little store in our non-town of 400 people or so that sells a variety of halfway decent food. The store is a wreck and the customers are usually unwashed and extremely fidgety people who I usually suspect have been partaking in controlled substances, but the food isn't bad - just don't think very hard about it. Bizarrely, inexplicably, the fish and chips sounds good. Why?

The last thing I ate before I got really sick was a fish sandwich from Burger King. Maybe my body is clinging to that last halfway pleasant memory and thinks that if I have fish again, things will be better. Actually, the last thing I ate was half of a turkey wrap my mom brought to me at the chemo clinic, but I was past the point of really being able to eat anything by then. The idea of eating a tortilla right now fills me with a kind of strange terror.

Yes, Virginia, there were mental disturbances! I became convinced that I had two colons, and that if I could only get the right one to properly void, everything would be better. Every time I went to the bathroom I kept hoping the right one would let go, but it was always the left one (even though I'd built the Visible Human model and knew that humans only had one knobbly pale blue-purple colon). At one point the third Brendan Fraser mummy movie was blaring at me (a loud, disappointing mess that was, too) and I was trying to turn down the volume, and after failing for quite some time I realized that I was gripping my left wrist in my right hand and attempting to turn down the volume with one of the small bones in my wrist (the Visible Human model was not detailed enough for me to attempt an identification). I also became convinced that Elmo the little dog wasn't really Elmo the little dog. Beats me who he was at the time, I just didn't think he was really Elmo (though since all Elmo really does is sleep and want to drink out of my water glass, he's easy to impersonate).