Last chemo eve

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Day 63. It is day 21 of the chemo cycle, the best and worst of days. Day 21 has the fewest side effects because it is the farthest away from the last treatment. And it is the closest to the next treatment, so prechemo meds begin.

Tomorrow is day 1, the worst and best of days. And tomorrow might be the most significant of the bests and the worsts. This round will be the hardest, these side effects the worst of all of them. And with the near geometric progression in misery from round 2 to 3, I am peering down the barrel of round 4 with more trepidation than ever.

And this round is the last. There is a way I am giddy with excitement to take my last Sunday night steroids, to get to the hospital, to get my IV. Bring on the dawn!  I welcome the sensations I know are coming, the good and the bad: the gentle warmth of the wheat pack to warm my hand, the lingering discomfort of the needle, the kindness of the cancer centre volunteers who bring me cups of weak tea, the burning of the antihistamine, the woozy sleepy contentment that washes through my veins, and the final blissful detachment from the IV at the end. The very end.

I know the present is always a swirl of  bitter and sweet, as each delightful or horrible experience is temporary and will swing in a different direction before too long. The temporary nature of the moment is one of the great intensifiers of pleasure and one of the great relievers of pain. “I will lose this bliss I feel” gets held in place alongside “this anguish will fade.” They are good company for each other.

So often, though the experience ahead of me appears less mixed. It is a thing I know to look forward to or a thing I know I am anxious about; somehow for me future events seem less hydrogenated. In the present, I know those events will be all swirled through with bitter and sweet, but the future looks somehow cleaner from a distance, its lines less blurred by proximity. (Perhaps this is why there is research about how a holiday increases your happiness more in the planning stage than in the experiencing of it.)

 

I am generally a bulldog watching myself fiercely if I am anticipating a dreadful thing in the future. I growl menacingly at me for any moments in my life I am aching to get over. I have a guideline that says I have made a bad set of choices if I can’t wait for this busy period, this stressful speech, this windy season to be over. I watch my propensity to want to rush through the next hard thing and then lounge in the sun. This hard thing I’m rushing through--this is my life I’m talking about. All I ever really have are the days that unfold before me; wishing for this period or that to be over is wishing my life away. I have tried to take these wishes as clues to the kind of life I want to lead. Wishing I was done with teaching a certain thing? I should either try to find the moments of joy in that teaching, or I should stop teaching it.

For chemo I have made an exception to that rule. I’m allowed to wish the days away, allowed to want the miseries of the first week to rush by in a forgettable blur. These are my investment days, the days given over in the hopes that I’ll get more days back from them. They are the sacrifice I put on the altar of my future. Too many of us put too many days on that altar. I have worked hard to stop doing that. But chemotherapy is an offering that demands its sacrifices: the time, the security, the health, the vibrancy, the hair (and now, oh sadly, the nails which are loosening their attachment too).

 

And so this is the last of the weeks I am wishing would soar quickly by on the gale force winds of this blustery dawn. I have never felt such giddy joy at the anticipation of a miserable thing. I am excited for the IV, excited for the belly shot, excited for the bone pain. Hello and goodbye to each of you. Let this final dose of yew juice do its job so that I don’t have to make this sacrifice on this altar again. And now is the time when the weaving through of all of you who have been so lovely and loving to me over the past months all comes together in a blanket I can wrap around me in this last part of this storm system. I can hear your voices on the wind.

Yesterday a gale blew through (of course, because we had a friend arrive from far away). It shook the house and pounded the windows and made the phlebotomist jump (not good) when the rain rattled sharply against the roof of the clinic. Wendy and I walked in the hills in the rain, yelling at each to be heard at all. Today, the wind blows still but the dawn is rosy and there are patches of blue sky. Life is like that. That much I can see coming.