Death Cult

I think they call it the Law of Unintended Consequences.

But it is funny how these new post-Enlightenment philosophies, humanism, materialism, feminism, nearly always result in the precise opposite of what they ostensibly propose. The new Humanism seems to have produced a slavering, bloodthirsty anti-human death cult obsessed with enslaving everyone to their lowest animalistic passions; radical materialism inevitably seems to spawn weird religious cults, and feminism has resulted directly in the deaths of hundreds of millions of women.

Funny.



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Girly stuff

Boys, avert your eyes.

Hats! Dresses! Wonderful things!



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Dear Irish Episcopate,

You're fired.

God.



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Self Portrait with Hair

So, the TIP regimen makes your hair fall out.

I had been in denial about this, but I've had it straight up from the doctors: it's all going to go.

I like Europe

I just wish it were being run by America.

This is funny, but it has a rude word in it so I'm only going to link.



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Docility

So, I have had a hard time fighting my natural fightyness when it comes to medical things, as was chronicled previously. I have an instinctive need to disobey doctors, to sniff at their outrageous demands and shrug when they issue dire warnings about... well, anything really. And yes, look at the fix I'm in for all that...

So, I'm learning a new spiritual thing: docility. (Yes, don't laugh.) Putting your life, your most basic needs, into the hands of someone else, a group of someones whom you know full well to be imperfect, flawed and more than capable of failure, is quite a little exercise in flinging yourself into the deep end of the spiritual life. I can't say I'm doing very well at it so far but I expect to be given loads more opportunities to practice.

Nevertheless, I am happy to report that I am, so far today, doing everything the doctors tell me to do. I have purchased everything they told me to purchase, and am taking all the drugs on time and in the correct doses.

This is really just an excuse to say thank you again to the people who donated so kindly to my cancer fund bleg. Today's excursion to the farmacia totaled €127 and was added to the cost of a cab ride back to Santa Marinella from the Gemelli, €100.

But we all got off quite easy today.

One of the many exciting side effects of the TIP regimen chemotherapy is killing off white blood cells, which I am given to understand are quite useful and important. To counteract this, they prescribed a one-shot injection of a drug called Neulasta that rapidly boosts your immune system by stimulating the bone marrow to produce white blood cells. A friend who was with me at the time we were getting the drug, himself a doctor, looked it up on the internet as we waited and saw that the one-off dose retails for $3000.00 in the US.

Yes, you read that right.

It was "covered"; everything else was over-the-counter and therefore on my own dime.

I am now going to bed.



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Free of the tree!

I have been having drugs to help me sleep, and I'm happy to say that they work very well. They are of the sort that take you right out of this world for a few blessed hours, do not interrupt or significantly affect your dreams (some soporifics give one the most amazing Timothy Leary dreams, but such things are not for me) and you wake up feeling refreshed and alert. I wish I could take them all the time, because sleeping is for me usually something of a trial and doesn't often work out as one might hope.

Unfortunately, the beneficial effects of this drug can be had only when they are used in great moderation, and more than five days of it gives one first the phenomenon of diminishing returns, whereby one has to take more and more to get the same result, and then physical dependency which, though not difficult to break, can be uncomfortable for a few days. So, not really a long-term solution to my normal short, disturbed and intermittent sleeping patterns.

But they are ideal for short hospital stays and, with a set of industrial ear plugs, are part of my usual arsenal of coping tools. Nothing in the world will make me despondent more quickly than lying awake in a hospital bed at three am, hooked up to tubes, mentally begging a nurse to remember to come and shut off the hall light that she left blaring into my eyes after administering the last injection/pill/IV bag-o-death.

I am a light sleeper and moreso when in hospital with all my high-tension tripwire security neurons set to high alert, so it is always quite a shock when I have been sleeping under the influence of the wonder drug to open my eyes and find a nurse standing over me: "Senora Whaayt?" Due to some unavoidable delays, the regimen schedule was knocked off and they had to give me some of the drugs in the middle of the night, so on two occasions, I had happily drifted off to visit the mermaids and flying elephants, only to be rudely wrenched back into the hospital bed with a most apologetic looking lady in green scrubs standing over me holding up a big dissolvable pill.

But this morning, the nurse, who before I had woken had already injected into the IV tube the last of the detox drugs, took the last empty bag down from the drug tree and said, "Finish..."

I can't tell you what a relief it is to be quit of the drug tree, my constant companion for the weekend, festooned up top with lugubriously swaying bulbous plastic bags of colourless deadly substances, waving like poison fruit as I took my little strolls up and down the corridor, its tentacular tubes and little plastic gauges catching on door knobs, its wheels, that wanted to go in every direction at once, squeaking out their little reminder: "Things are not the same..."



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The internet;

exactly as dull and pointless as TV, only there's ten thousand times more of it.

I've been dosed and blood-pressured, I've brushed teeth, washed hair and face, had my tea and crackers, taken my drug-tree for a little stroll up and down the hall...

so let's see what's in the little square Palantir today...



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Turns out that being in hospital is like war...

long periods of mind-numbing boredom, interspersed with short bursts of equally mind-numbing terror.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Chemo.

It turns out I have "difficult" veins. I've always had this problem and am the bane of all IV-inserters' professional lives. Yesterday I got in here by about 2pm and at 2:30, three different nurses had tried to put in a functioning IV into my arms and hands in four different places. On the fifth try, we got it to work, but the decision was made to surgically insert a veinous catheter which will have to stay in my arm for about a month. Until the next round of chemo.

That was fun, requiring a short surgical procedure during which I learned that I have a robust resistance to local anaesthetics. Great fun to be lying on a table, with them digging around 5 cm inside your upper arm, dodging important arteries, and suddenly they hit a part that the anaesthetic hadn't found yet. Four tank-fuls of local anaesthetic later...Gah!

Oh, and no swimming for three weeks. I can lower myself into the pool, but I have to cover the bandage with plastic wrap and try not to get it wet. Fun fun!

This morning, I had another batch of water spiked with a large dose of anti-emetics, anti-histamines and various drugs that are meant to protect the stuff chemo drugs attack and that I need to keep. This kind of chemo kills the cancer but also the cells lining the bladder, and the kidneys and the brain, so as I've been having the IV drips of the deadly stuff, I've been given small doses of "antidoto" in the form of pills that dissolve in a glass of water to stave of "neurotoxicity".

I realise they have to tell you these things to keep you up with "informed consent" but really, there are a few things I might be better off not worrying about. They know the signs to watch for and are so attentive that I'm growing in confidence.

Today we had to wait seven hours for a surgical expert to come to insert the "pic" and the next bag of poison was delayed. I am just about finished the second batch, cisplatin, and am having mannitol as a chaser to keep my kidneys from failing. There is a gaggle of nattering Italian ladies chattering away all at the same time, clustered around my roommate's bed, and I am torn between being slightly jealous of their customary stick-togetherness, and relief that I don't have to be pestered all day by crowds of relatives. Such an Anglo misanthrope, me!

Every time the nurse comes in and hooks me up to another plastic bag of clear liquid, I ask the same thing: "Che cos'è?" One of the nurses is obviously becoming annoyed by my obsession with knowing exactly what and how much poison they're pumping into me. When they hooked up the Mannitolo, I asked again, and she said that it's just "the protocol. The doctor esplain it all!" From now on I will just crane up and read the label upside down and quietly type the name into Google.

The nurse has just come and added another one to the ever-growing stack of plastic bags and bottles of incredibly toxic substances on the little table in the room, all waiting to go into my arm. At the other end of the table, the roommate's six female relatives are clustered around a little portable DVD player watching home videos. (The three men are all chatting in the hall outside the door.)

There is always something slightly surreal about medicine.

Oh by the way, a little note for people planning on getting cancer in Italy, don't get it in the summer. The Gemelli doesn't have air conditioning. I got a friend to bring over a fan (and the weather has not yet reached the Terrifying Italian Summer-On-The-Sun tipping point where even a fan at full blast ten inches from your face is no relief) but I can't imagine what everyone else is doing. Sweltering I guess. The procedure room where I had the surgery was at least ten degrees hotter than my room. I can't understand how they manage it, but I'm a northern Celt and we don't do hot weather.

More gruesome details as events warrant.

H



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Passing the time

The view from Beachcomber park, the beach where my grandmother taught me to swim.

I'm sitting up in bed and have just had my first giant yellow bowl of delicious Gemelli tea, eaten my toast and apricot jam, had a teeth and face scrub and combed my hair and it's not quite eight am and I'm feeling ok.

Once again, the staff at the Gemelli have impressed me with their kindness and attentiveness. I came in late yesterday, and more or less terrified of chemo. I had spent the day before coming here to have last minute blood tests which, although they started early in the morning, with the train ride into and out of town, took up most of the useful parts of the day.

I hate coming home from any trip to a messy house, and I knew that chemo would probably put me in a non-doing of housework sort of mood. I also knew that I was incapable of doing anything with my brain like writing or drawing. Physical movement was required, so I bustled about: made sure that all the laundry was done, clothes all hung up, towels folded, clean sheets on the beds, clean bathroom, plants watered, surfaces dusted, all the dishes done and put away, and all my 50 sq kilometers of marble floors at least dustmopped and cleaned. After that, I cooked. Beef and lentil stew, fried chicken breasts, Thai chicken curry and frumenty. Simple stuff put in tubs and in the freezer so I won't have to do any cooking next week.

All the domestic busyness did succeed in keeping my mind off things. That and endless episodes of bad American Syfy channel tv shows played from the net. I was literally carrying my Mac into every room as I worked.

The next day, I woke up with a shock. I had spent the night dreaming, again, I was home again in my grandmother's house in Nanoose Bay, and woke with such a feeling of loss that I found I was calling for her.

This time of year, she would be sending me into the garden to fetch things for her to put into the dinner. Mint for the new potatoes from the herb patch in the shaded courtyard. Scarlet runner beans from the vines growing up the side of the veranda. Flowers for the table from the rose beds.

We would be going to the rocky beach down the lane so you could roll a log into the icy Pacific water and use it as a canoe, then come out and lie without a towel on the sizzling flat black shale pebbles. When you lie down on them wet with cold skin, they dry you instantly and stick to your back. When you've roasted enough, while grandma in her black straw hat sits on a white bleached log and sketches the arbutus trees with a stub of conte, you put on your hat and canvass runners and go climbing over the volcanic rocks poking your fingers into the green anemones that lined the tide pools like living velvet.

Then grandma would call you back, and we would pack up our things and climb through the cool forest back up to the road and go have our lunch, sitting at the table in the little dining room, while the crows sit in the Garry Oak in the courtyard, calling out their annoyance that they are not invited.

Yesterday morning, I woke up to discover again, as I have so many other mornings, that it was all gone, the house sold and grandma dead for twelve years. It was not the best moment to remember that I would be going into the hospital for chemotherapy.

More later.



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