Délires II: Alchimie du verbe - Delirium 2: Alchemy of Words
Rimbaud: the narrator then steps in and explains his own false hopes and broken dreams.
April 20th - April 24th 2009
So where to begin with this one. I know that there had been an update forthcoming as it was. I can’t recall much of what happened between getting out of the hospital and waiting for my first outpatient chemo treatment, so I guess rather than bother wasting the time trying to explain things that I can’t very well remember I’ll just go on with what I can recall has happened.
I went to see my Oncologist last Thursday just to check my blood and be told that basically how I had experienced the chemo in the hospital would be essentially the same as how I would experience chemo every time in the future, with some possible fatigue thrown in as the chemo set in more. I got my neupogen shots Thursday and Friday and prepared myself for the weekend and chemo on monday.
The weekend went pretty normal, I had a hard time sleeping, again. Sunday came around and the right side of my neck was fairly sore, I figured it was just from lack of sleep and too much talking on the phone, as that tends to have similar effects. I woke up Monday morning and could not move my neck under my own control and some of my neck around the clavicle on the right side were swollen pretty bad. Oncologist was called and he advised that I come in two hours early to check it out in case I needed to go to the hospital.
As it turns out, of course, I had to make a visit to the hospital because I had managed to get myself infected, sweet. I’d be there at least three days. This part gets blurry for me, I slept in the front seat of my dad’s car while he waited in the emergency room for them to call my name. I got in and laid down and after that I just remember pain and a lot of blurred vision and lots of blood being taken.
Somehow I had contracted a staph infection and it had decided to rush itself over to my port (foreign body that my white blood cells were fighting…so you know…everything went there and then spread through there), my white blood count had risen from 3% on Thursday to 16% on Monday, from very low to very high.
At some point I was finally put in a room and pretty quickly after that taken down to the radiology department to have my port removed. A really weird guy who reminded me a whole lot of John Goodman (as Dan Conner not Walter Sobchack, thankfully or maybe not, I’d have probably loved Sobchack in that situation) came over and talked to me for a minute and then I was slid on the table and anesthetised. I don’t remember much after that, except that I was nervous (this is actually out of the ordinary for me) and delirious and that now I had a hole in my chest.
Most of the days at the hospital are just a big blur overall. I was given a lot of dilaudid and slept a lot probably as a result of that. I watched 2.5 baseball games and spent a fair amount of this visit online, a lot more than before as I found an acceptable bed position that wasn’t too uncomfortable. I had a really great nurse two days in a row, which is always a plus since there are plenty of awful nurses and you encounter a lot of them during extended stays at the hospital. At any rate, she took really great care of me and that was definitely a plus. I was also allowed to wear t-shirts and go outside to have cigarettes pretty much at my will.
Thursday I had a picc line inserted. That was a…uh…it was an event, let’s put it that way. The pair they sent to do that were interesting. The male was probably close to 50 and he was loud, obnoxious, and had a weird redneck accent, his co-hort, a short fat snapp woman who reminded me in personality of Roseanne (weird, I got Roseanne and Dan in one visit) and he were making jokes and swearing at each other, calling each other names the whole time. Finally they cooled down and the guy started throwing around pretty intense medical terminology and I calmed down because this, to me, said that he knew what he was doing. He found the vein and showed me on the ultrasound screen (pretty crazy and awesome) and then started the procedure. It was…not painless, but I’m not sure why it wasn’t painless. I guess my skin didn’t take to the lidocaine, because my whole arm was numb, but I could clearly and very evidently feel the scalpel cutting through my skin (hurts like hell, if you’re wondering. Feels exactly how you’d imagine.) Before he inserted the catheter he was checking to make sure that the line was clear and sent some saline through, he then intentionally pointed the catheter at his cohort and got her right in the eye from across the room, which he had promised that he would do earlier when they came in and they were exchanging insults. After the procedure was over he told me about his tattoo, I quote verbatim, “I’ve got one on my left shoulder, it’s of a rebel flag and it says “Born To Be” because My mom always told me I was born to be, and I’d always ask, “born to be what?” and she’d say, “i don’t know figure that out on your own.”“ Fairly unbelievable and added to my subtle insecurity of the situation; however had my arm not been so numb I’d have high-fived him for his incredibly awesome tattoo…come to think he definitely high-fived me when he left.
I got out about two hours later and got attached to my fanny pack IV pump that I’ll be working really hard to make into a legitimate accessory for the next to weeks as I can’t be detached from it at all until May 7th. I acclimated to having to carry it with me everywhere pretty quickly, though. I call it my man purse because I sling it over my shoulder cause it’ll just fall down if I put it around my waist. Also because I am reminded of referring to them as “fag bags” as a child, not to upset anyone that is concerned about political correctness, it was a different time and frankly still, I’m not worried about offending anyone with something so simple as that. 
The home health nurse came today and changed the dressing in my chest and over the picc line. That wasn’t very eventful. So the schedule now after this unplanned run in with Staphylococcus aureus is to stay on the antibiotics for two weeks, get back on chemo again through the picc line, probably for one cycle (two treatment sessions) and then have another port inserted on the other side of my chest and not get that one infected and to continue on from there and things will go back to the normalcy that they were at before. 
I feel pretty excellent aside from some pain from the hole in my chest and some itching from the pain medicine.
