Part 41 Lighter than college


On a breezy Monday morning I return to work, able to start some half days on the job. At the end of the morning I visit my doctor, weighing in at merely 155 pounds, probably lighter than even in college days. Better grab hold of something so the breeze won’t carry me away. This would be a good day to pull out some of my old tight clothes. Some of my nutritional levels are down, so I am prescribed vitamin supplements. I am told that I must practice eating in order to retrain my salivary glands. Becah buys me powdered weight gain supplements to add to milk to help bulk me up. Someone hands me a coke Icee and I drink a few sips. The afternoon is rough, because the mucous, chills, and fatigue have kicked in, as they do periodically, and there is no telling when they will leave. I walk Brooke to the park out of sheer refusal to give in to this. Returning home, we enter the kitchen, greeted by the smell of personal pizzas made with biscuit dough. A neighbor soon brings over bread pudding with whiskey sauce to top everything off. All I can do, however, is eat one bite of applesauce, and that is dinner for me.

The next morning I sleep in, well beyond my usual wake up time, and arrive at work at 9:45. I last 45 minutes before I return home. I start retching – dry heaves only, and call Becah at work to come home to rescue me. My fever is 100.6. I go to bed and sleep most of the afternoon. In the evening, Becah takes the kids to eat while I stay a home and finish reading a British novel “Absolute Beginners”, which I realize is disturbing me as being too negative. I don’t need anymore of that.

Today I stay home from work altogether, feeling better in the morning. My fever rises to 101 by early afternoon, though. Later it’s back to the center for a round of blood work, port test, urine sample, and chest x-ray. After another day of staying home from work, sleeping, and intermittent fever, I meet with my doctor, who surmises that I have a “touch of pneumonia”, probably caused by excessive mucous. My weight drops more (153.5 now). He wants the port-o-cath removed to prevent infection, and Dr. Br-, who put it in, agrees to remove it in a few days. Back home, my daughter Bree displays her batting skills with a little baseball in the front yard. I make bowtie pasta for the kids to eat and me to watch them eat. Before bed I notice more hair falling out – it has been about two weeks since the second round of chemo – which is bad since some had started growing back, and my eyebrows are actually bushy!

It is frightening when your body starts to rebel. What before seemed so familiar and predictable has become a stranger to me. I wonder now how I will look tomorrow, how I will function tomorrow, if I will ever adapt to this changing “me”.