It Might Get Messy

The trendy set who pound down cocktails and white wines at what was once the Fulton Fish Market might get a kick out of the memory of tuna entrails, eel slime, and shark’s blood that the Helly Hansen ancestors of their Ferragamos stood up and worked hard in for 6 days a week. 

Then again, they might not. Nothing like a big splurge of halibut guts to set up an ongoing relationship! (take that, “match.com”!). But that’s not our point here today. We are here today, I’m afraid, so that I can whine. Seems to me that’s it’s been a while since I’ve allowed myself a good, shaky, high-powered whine indulgence. And that I’ve recently accumulated sufficient more-or-less serious complaints to warrant a session of good, old fashioned bitching. 

Let’s start on Tuesday afternoon. We headed into the clinic for my day’s dose of radioactivity exposure when I am stricken with a violent, world-shaking incidence of dizziness. I can barely lower myself to the floor to prevent falling and cracking my skull. Cathy runs to the reception area to call the hospital “Rapid Response Team” (who, to their credit, arrive in no more than 3 or 4 minutes with a dozen people and variety of tools for safety and diagnostics). I’m now lying in a big puddle of vomit and feeling, if anything, worse. So of course they admit me for observation (this has something to do with the insurance payments, BTW. Try to make certain that you are admitted as “in-patient”—it makes a vast difference in what is covered).

Anyway. I’m admitted, monitored, attended to. All seems fine. Eventually they get me on a stretcher and down for the CT scan that was the original objective of the visit. Looks good, although a bit scary. A whole landscape of incipient tumors is growing on the pleural surface of my insides, each waiting its chance to bust loose and pour malignancies into important components of my anatomy. Sigh. These very tumors are the ones that the first round of chemotherapeutic drugs are intended to hammer. And why the depressing “sigh” in that sentence up there? Simply this. When they hauled me down for the infusion of monoclonal antibody treatment, my body finally rebelled. Violently. The infusion sets off the chain reaction that is the classic anaphylactic immune response. My breathing stops. Heart stops. Body starts to shut down. Damn good thing I was in a large room containing all the hardware and software modern medicine requires, plus the doctors needed to make all that hardware play “Bolero” in any key you call.  

 Fast forward to Sunday evening. I’m sitting in my Recovery Recliner, working my way through the heap of pill, tablets, capsules, and gel caps that constitute my nightly medications. Then I settle in to watch a little TV and get set to head upstairs to bed. But after a few minutes, I notice Cathy and Jesse both staring at me. “What’s wrong?” they ask, simultaneously. “Uh, nothing that I know of. Why?” Well, it turns out I had been scribbling out a white board message to ask them a question. Then I realize, like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”, that I’ve been writing the same sentence over and over and over on the white board. This is a little frightening. But there do not seem to be any other overt signs of a stroke, so we avoid the exigency of waking up the doctor who lives next door to come take a look. Rather, we drive to the Emergency Room at the local hospital (Howard County General) instead of the further away Greater Baltimore Medical Center which has been taking care of me to date. 

After a couple days of “observation”, everyone agrees I can go home. So they send me on my way. So now, with the radiation over and done and the chemotherapy on its way, my life is gonna suck for a while. But notice that critical word: “life”. My LIFE is gonna suck. Which means the doctors are not yet ready to heave me onto the collection wagons. And I am CERTAINLY not ready to be heaved onto the etc. 

Life: it’s not always pretty, and it’s not always comfortable. But dammit, it IS “life”. And I’m gonna be in that arena, Claymore vs. Claymore, battling the evil armies of mutated malignancies. In fact, on Wednesday, they’ll try the next chemotherapy drug in line. Not sure what it is. But if it has any side effects like the monochlonal antibodies, you’re gonna hear about ‘em right here next week. So remember to check back in. Worst case, there’ll be at least one or more humorous anecdotes to relate. Best case…well, let’s not go there yet. The best case is good, but highly unlikely. I’ll walk you through the technical details next week. So check back in. Remember that I love you all. And that I’m hoping your summer if going better than mine!!!