It isn't pain, it's change

For the past two nights, I've been unable to sleep, so I sleep during the day when fatigue sets in, back on my upside down schedule. I'm considering trying to stay awake today all day, in hopes that fatigue matches, say, an 11pm bedtime. I'd like to push reset to normal.

I am, I think, just the victim of the Spring phlegm slide, which is gross, and trust me I wouldn't mention it if it wasn't real and germane to the topic. I don't process this like you normals, of course, so its presence in my life is noisome and occasionally scary. I hate feeling like I'm choking and realizing that--if I am--I have very few options to prevent it. Sudafed has been clearning my nose, but they've not yet made the pill that clears a clogged up throat. 

I did though realize an important fact in the midst of this blockage and drainage crisis--it's been at least two weeks since I took any pain medicine. The morphine elixir and the lortab elixir are milling about the cupboard, bored. I've forgotten to change my fentanyl patch because I may not need it so much anymore. 

I want to celebrate this, but such a celebration could be short lived. My chin is now further south than it's been before, my lower lip has an accordion fold that's new--my skin feels tighter over the upper teeth I have left--how long until that rubs the wrong way and drives me batshit crazy? Honestly, I don't know--am I projecting a pain that may not come? Possibly. Do I really believe that possibility? no. 

I've found that in a typical doctor's visit, you will hear X number of possibly good outcomes and X number of possibly bad ones. The variable is contained within your situation. Up to this point, my condition was pretty bad so my X was a fairly high number, say 4 or 5 each. You will notice, if you ascend to this exalted layer of the healthcare system, that the good things the doctor predicts rarely come true; they are too subject to further variations upon their delicate positive status. Note, though, that the bad ones nearly always come true, in a fair flush of health and agency, and it's always as bad as predicted. 

Perhaps negativity does sell more stories, and the dramatics of medicine simply emphasize a winning hand. Or decline is simply easier to chart than upswing--more definite and certain of foot. Or cancer is just the buzzkill I've called it all along, subject to the negative far more than the positive--or a combination of all these possible factors.

Simply be prepared: forewarned, forearmed.

But, dropping out of one medicine pool is not a bad thing whatsoever--particularly when that pool includes opiates, and may dull one with the certainty that they help one too. I am a swimmer in the pool of toxicity--it's not like I need to add to my lack of buoyancy in the water. 

At my last visit with Dr. Dayton, he hinted at the possibility that I'll be given a chemo holidy in the indeterminate future. That would be another pin knocked over in the "return my blood supply to actual blood instead of half pharmaceuticals. No doubt Anthem would enjoy a few weeks without a weekly bill of $6800., We could all use a breather, and not least my veins which are a bit weary of the weekly sticks. 

So it's not pain, it's change. I'm growing up as a cancer patient. I'll cusping on my first "remission" (I'll never really be cancer free they tell me; but cancerless enough for a break), I've beaten expectations, I'm loosening myself from painkillers with no doctor pressuring me to do so. I may be nearly Junior year at Cancer U, after all. 

Admittedly I'm still fixated on mortality. i'm still polling my friends to find out what defines a "good" person. I am not sitting by the door waiting for the bell, I'm defining space and tasks my own way, with no outer reference. I'm not even cooking much for Charles who has his own plans for his diet. But I am not wondering how tomorrow arrives, and I'm meeting it less often with my bedroom light on. Another reason that a good night's sleep is just the change I need.