Pure Cancer Buzzkill

The quiet around here lately is indicative of two disparate threads in my cancer treatment.

The first is that I've accumulated fatigue along the way. The loss of 1/4 of my body weight, the weight of radiation and chemo, the trips back and forth on the bus...they add up and I'm tired. Sometimes too tired to eat, sometimes too tired to type, and occasionally too tired to give a shit.

The second is that I'm lapping onto the final countdown of this phase--and when I say "this phase" I mean that I suspect they will be more in the future. On Monday, after radiation, I'll have 7 more to go--which means I'll finish a week from next Wednesday. There will be two more chemo infusions--and after this, we'll start the assessment phase.

Truly I'm hoping for a bit of vacation--a week with no doctor's appointments, and no mandatory bus trips and no concern about the time. I'd like to sleep all day and dream of ice cream cakes, which have been very much on my mind as every ice cream chain is advertising them for Father's Day. Cruelty, thy name is Cold Stone Creamery.

I suppose that assessment will be about as much fun as standing and being measured for a new dress or suit--barometers of wellness placed against the self and the self found wanting. I hope against hope to find that all my pessimism about another phase of treatment is ill founded, that the increase in radiation and the extra dosing in chemo took care of the growths they found the last time they looked.

Cancer astonishes me because it's so...directed. It has one thing to do and it simply goes about it in a flagrantly effective way. Were I to try being so efficient, I would grind to a halt midweek in boredom, having nothing left to do. The idea that growths sprouted even as I was being poisoned and laser beamed half to death gives me a new appreciation, though not respect, for what an errant cell or two can effectuate.

Cancer, too, bores me with its finely honed hattred of health. Aside from this blog, I spend virtually no time either thinking or talking about it. The idea of people sitting around discussing their health conditions is something of a parental flashback to me--I was never so amused as when I listened to my parents talk about their panoply of medical appointments. I swore it would never be that way for me....right.

When I first starting writing this blog, I occasionally blasted the machine of medicine--the great conglomerate that swallows one up and refuses to spit out the bone. It's interesting to re-read that now, as digested as I am into the belly of the beast. The rest of my life is now set with call back appointments and monitoring; I may move categories from patient to survivor, but those categories are self-identified: To the system, I'm now forever a patient, a ticking time bomb of potential re-colonization. Fair game for whatever happens between now and then in the treatment universe.

Perhaps there will be a gene-altering shot that will shut off the valve that makes these zombies--something so elegant, so permanent, that I'll be liberated from the tower and set free. Maybe to eat again, to speak again, to cut an ice cream cake in two and have half for breakfast; after all, I've got 40 pounds of health to regain.