Now, let's quickly dispel any concern about magnitude--this is freshmen stuff. Considering the various pains people experience, this is a paper cut. My complaint of it is more of that it's unusual than anything else--in fact from from 18 hour surgery through treatment, I've rarely had any pain medicine and have neither needed nor wanted it. That, I've considered the manner in which luck manifested upon my treatment where it seemed to fail in other ways. I was spared little of what kind of peculiar radiation can bring to one, and though precious little nausea came my way from chemo, a lot of weight loss settled on me and nothing fits after 50 pounds went missing.
And this is about the chipmunk cheeks, which haven't gone away, down or moved south. They've settled on my face as though it would be natural to strap saddlebags there. Where else, the waist? so much more convenient to have things up!
It isn't that lymphedema hurts, but it slams my cheeks into the teeth they haven't pulled (I have no lowers, they didn't fabricate those out of the bone they used to rebuild me--lazy, huh?), and it takes a fanciful area of the face, perhaps the only part that could look like ass and makes it look like fat ass. I'm aware of that, painfully.
At night, as my cheek smashes into the pillow, my goldfish mouth pops open and a snail trail marks where I've been. I sleep on towels the same way a dog does when leakage is feared. I wake with a face stiffened but no less ballooned, and the lips of a dirty cartoon character.
One hospital here in the Bay Area runs a lymphedema rehab clinic, which I'm trying to schedule myself into...the doctors have told me that LE (we'll use that from now on) isn't uncommon--after you rip out the lymph system, there's often no logical place for all this fluid to go--but go it sometime must. Protein-rich and ripe for bacteria, it forms a reservoir of infection, a bacteria pool, and can even turn carcinogenic. And that's just what we need now, more damn cancer.
LE is often associated with breast cancer, notable also for a large loss of local lymph systems, ripped out by compromise with cancer cells that find it an irresistible pathway to the elsewhere it's always looking to destroy. The new horizon upon which it can wreck its havoc. St. Mary's notes on its website that it uses compression garments and massage among its techniques--and I can see massage, but will I get a compression garment designed for this face? A training bra for the misplaced mounds? Frankly it wouldn't matter. At this point I'd wear a 16th Century poultice if I thought it would help.
At 3:36 this morning, I woke up because backed up snot entered my sinuses and blocked my breathing--and all the new pressures on my face have made it harder to rid myself of this spew and harder to sleep and harder to want to leave the house. This adds up to nothing good.
I've been using a tiny bit of morphine elixir that they gave me when i left the hospital to handle this discomfort--akin to deciding that an atomic weapon is the only response to rid one's campsite of mosquitoes. Yet, I have nothing else around that would do much having not needed pain medication and having not saved anything for those amorphous future days when it would needed.
I have requested some from one of my doctors, but we'll see what they say--I suppose they'll be surprised. They start each visit with the famous "are you in pain" question and routinely, I'm not, often to their utter surprise, but not mine. I've come to depend upon the fact that physical discomfort was off limits to this cancer, my line in the sand. It's been allowed to open fistulas in my neck, turn my blood into colored water, screw with my taste buds, take away my ability to eat, but I did draw the line at pain.
So just as a reminder, cancer--here's the line. Just cross it bitch and see what happens.
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