The Chemo Journey

1 Sam. 1:15 “And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.”

The Chemo Journey

Preparing for the inevitable chemo Herceptin was an anxiety driven road riddled with potholes. First with the, “We need to see if your heart can handle this drug,” to “Come in the day before treatment to have your blood drawn.” All while having to say my goodbyes to the wonderful young lady who brought me this far in my Physical Therapy recovery and her team that I had grown to know and love over seven months.

A rollercoaster of emotions that I’m still not sure I’m doing the right thing but I was powering through like a champ. The heart test was tedious; take my blood, wait thirty minutes, put my blood back with some kind of drug that would identify if my heart was pumping. Into a tube after putting those lovely sticky nodule things on my chest and into the tube for twenty minutes of picture taking. I wouldn’t find out the results until chemo-day.

Even the day of drawing my blood was filled with anxiety as the lady who drew my blood was not the regular lady and it kind of hurt this time with the wiggling of the chair's arm. My arm was at an awkward position, thus the needle hurt going in and when she was done, she pressed on some cotton that didn’t feel too good but again, I was pushing through the day. Test results wouldn’t be available until the next day, chemo day. 

Chemo day arrived and my anxiety had hit an all-time high. There was no form of meditation or prayer calming me that’s for sure but again, trudge through, rain and all. I did want to go to the Mall and the Pretzel Palace where they make fresh soft pretzels. The day before we went there and met up with my son and he said he'd like to do that again on chemo day if I didn’t mind. Mind? Hubby, son and a soft pretzel equal heaven to me! And an FYI, NO, I'm not supposed to be eating it but at least I passed on the melted cheddar cheese that you could get with the pretzel. It was definitely comforting food for me in a hard time.

This was also the day the flood waters began to show signs of keeping us from getting out of the house. Hubby had been having troubles with his truck and hadn’t driven it much this winter and there was no way our already previously flooded out driveway would allow our car through. The water was rising, the substation across the road was covered, surrounded by water as I’d never seen. I was ready to cancel.

Hubby, determined to get me the doctor on Chemo Day, tried his truck, it started right up. He revved and revved, turned it off and on a couple of times and he was good to go! I wasn’t ready but he and the truck were.

As we swerved around the bend to slosh our way to the entry of our driveway, we saw what we were in for. The water around the substation was now crossing the road. The truck stalled, rev it up, stall. “Let’s go back,” I said anxiously. But instead, the next rev of the engine had us swerving on our way, up the muddy dirt road, where the ditches were almost level with the road beside them. On we went.

I had texted my son that we were on our way and would meet him at the mall at the Pretzel Palace. A relaxing visit that eased my anxiety and found me not in tears heading off to the Chemo that I was still against but trudged on anyway.

Arriving at the set time, slumped over and sad, I could feel my smile was a frown. I was not happy to be there and the thoughts of being a small child being led into a gas chamber weighed heavy on my mind. The weigh-in was grim. The hellos were stilted and the waiting for someone to come in and tell me what was next was like waiting for a dentist to yank out a wisdom tooth! I was so glad to have my husband by my side, but I could see that he too was tormented with confusion and uncertainty.

After a forty minute wait, the twenty-minute idle chit chat of the PA sent me off to ‘pick out a chair’ and they’ll set you right up. The room with the chairs was like looking at coffins to pick out. All looked like nice comfy recliners with chairs beside them for guests, but the recliners themselves looked like a deathbed. I feared that room from my very first day of diagnosis and now here I was, a victim to be sat in ‘the chair’.

As I, with a head of thinning hair sat and looked around, there was elderly bald folk hooked up by a port to get their poison. A thin young bald guy awaited his blood to be drawn and another lady waited for a shot in the stomach. Oh, the torture. I was about to cry when my doctor appeared saying he had a cold so he wouldn’t be shaking my hand today and asked if I was okay and had any questions. I had hundreds but shook my head no, tears now brimming my eyes. More idle chit chat that I didn’t hear and the nurse appeared with a needle. “You don’t have a port?” She asked quite shockingly like why are you here?
I told her no and she proceeded to stick a needle in my ‘bony arm’ and the juice flowed. For ninety minutes, with my back already in pain, I would sit as the poison flowed into my veins. I was now a victim of chemo. Outside the window, the sun briefly shone. Days on end of clouds and rain and here I was on my deathbed and the sky opened up and let the sun out to dance for a while.

After the ninety minutes were up, the nurse came back to flush something in my arm and I’d be there another ten minutes. This was almost a three-hour visit! I was hooked up to a blood pressure machine also, as this form of chemo affected the heart and they wanted to monitor me. I watched my blood pressure go from 115 to well over 140 by the time I left.

I rose to leave. Weakened, I almost dropped. My back in utter pain. Walker in hand, I made a beeline for the door, with my husband in hot pursuit. Walking past the front desk smiley receptionist says, “Is that all for today?” I wanted to tell her to go… nevermind… “I’m fine, thanks.” And walked out the door to be met by dark clouds, a chilled swift breeze and a mist starting to fall from the sky. The sun had run away too!

The chills, the pain, the anxiety, the sadness, the fear, the glazed watery eyes, the mud-puddles pretending to be roads all made their presence known. I will wallow in self-pity and figure out what I do now. Where does one go from here? 

TO BE CONTINUED…

There will be the REST of this story.
Please, no harsh criticism.

Pss. 18:4-5 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid. The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.

Quotation Saturday

TRUTH

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
~ Mark Twain

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
~ Oscar Wilde

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
~ Winston Churchill

HONESTY

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

“ It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
~ George Washington

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Hiding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes you a liar.”
~Jenny O'Connell, The Book of Luke

“Let's tell the truth to people. When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avaoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don't want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.”
~ Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

DICTATORSHIP

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
~ George Orwell, 1984

“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.”
~Bruce Coville

“Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.”
~ Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution”
~Aldous Huxley

VICTIM

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“You are not a victim. No matter what you have been through, you're still here. You may have been challenged, hurt, betrayed, beaten, and discouraged, but nothing has defeated you. You are still here! You have been delayed but not denied. You are not a victim, you are a victor. You have a history of victory.”
~ Steve Maraboli

“You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It all depends on how you view your life.”
~ Maria Eleven Minutes

“As a victim of dictatorship, I will not cower in fear, I will face the battle alone and cease all pain endured.”
~J