The Hardest Part

The hardest part of chemotherapy isn't the stuff that happens at the infusion center. It's not getting stabbed with a giant needle when they access your port. It's not the twisting and turning and syringes and experimenting as they try to get a blood return. It's not the conversation with the oncologist or the physicians assistant as they try to explain away the bad news and highlight the good. It's not even the infusion, with its cornucopia of toxic chemicals.

Nope, the hardest part of chemotherapy is trying to get to sleep the night after the infusion. 

You climb into bed alone and all the distractions that keep you going through the day -- work, house repairs, insane cat behaviors, art projects, dirty dishes, etc.  -- they all fall away. It's just you and your cancer. So your brain starts processing: questioning the decisions you've made, stewing on the decisions that will eventually need to be made, lamenting the "unfairness" of it all (as if fairness has anything to do with it; if you didn't learn that life isn't fair in kindergarten, you weren't paying attention), and generally wallowing in the negative aspects of life with cancer, and life generally.

But that's just the mental part. There's also the physical.

As your feet slide along the sheets you're immediately reminded of the neuropathy. Your toes start buzzing, and the skin around them starts to feel three sizes too small. The feeling fades, but every time you move your toes it all comes rushing back. 

And then you realize that everything -- literally everything -- hurts. Your head is pounding, because the Excedrin PM you took before you got into bed either hasn't started working yet or isn't going to work, and there's a weird buzzing in your ears. And though you pretty much spent the entire day sitting or lying down, your legs feel like you've hiked from the foot to the peak of a nearby mountain; You try to stretch and turn in the hopes that the pain will fade, but in doing so your toe inadvertently invades the cat's space, so now the cat thinks it's time to play and for the next thirty minutes you listen to her run laps through the condo, scratch at what you assume to be the carpets, and wrestle with the paper bag that you left on the kitchen floor. Occasionally she'll jump on the bed to make sure you're still there, but it's not long before the laps begin again. 

And in the midst of all this you notice the heartburn, pain that runs down your esophagus from the back of your neck to your stomach. So you wonder if it's worth getting out of bed to try to find a drug to treat it, not really knowing what, exactly, you ought to take. Prescription anti-nausea medication? Pepto-Bismo? Gas-X? Tums? All of the above? Moreover, you know that if you get out of bed you likely won't get back into bed. And this starts you balancing the scales in your mind: the desperate desire for sleep on the one side; the neuropathy, leg pain, back pain, headache, heartburn and buzzing on the other. 

Eventually your realize that it's just not worth it so you give up, opt for the Pepto-Bismo, and move to the couch where you can turn on the TV in the hopes of creating a distraction which might possibly allow you some sleep. 

We won't even begin to talk about late night television. 

But the worst of the worst? At some point your brain works its way back to the point where life was at its best, when you felt good and had the energy to be great at your job, a spouse that seemed to love you, and a big giant house on Ravenna, and you wonder how on earth you wound up here.

That's the hardest part.