The Human Pincushion

The photo is of me in a wig that Merry is loaning me. She also gave me a great hat which goes well with it. I'll post that next.

Today day began at 5:30 this morning when the alarm rang. Although that is the hour at which I awaken when my life is unimpeded by a life threatening disease or its treatment, I’ve fallen into different habits these past couple of months, going to bed later and arising later, so 5:30 seemed awfully early. After lying in bed and listening to the latest disasters on the radio for fifteen minutes, I finally bestirred myself, arose, threw on yesterday’s clothes, and went downstairs. I didn’t bother with a shower. I preferred breakfast to cleanliness and I had forfeited my shower time by lying in bed.

The dog slowly got to her feet a few minutes after I entered the kitchen and limped towards me as I put on water to boil eggs and filled the kettle. Ancient and arthritic, she tottered toward me to receive her greeting. Food Woman had once again arrived in her world and the Big Event was soon to occur. But first we had to go outside for her to perform her part of the bargain. I put on the family coat, inherited from my father and at least 40 years old, an old green thing fraying at the cuffs. Thus armed against the cold, I opened the back door.

Oh, my heavens, but it was cold this morning. The cold slapped me in the face as I tromped down the back stairs. I verbally coaxed the ancient beast to follow. She expects me to carry her up and down the stairs these days but I’ve had to forgo that in the past week since lifting her caused me to injure my back. She stared at me in disbelief for a moment then slowly and painfully took the first step, then the next, and the next, as I cajoled her. She finally made it to the bottom and found a frozen piece of ground on which to squat. I then tromped to the top of the stairs and beckoned her up. She regarded me for a moment with that same air of injured incredulity, and then encouraged by the a promise of breakfast, ascended more quickly than she had descended. I rewarded her with an Old Dog Treat (ODT as we call it) of chondroitin and glucosamine in a beef-flavored square. Oh yum. She chewed that up as I spooned out the dog food. I put it on the floor and there commenced The Best Minute of the Day, that eagerly anticipated moment, and the justification of Food Woman’s existence. It’s nice to be needed, if only for my can opening and spooning skills.

I made my breakfast and ate it, all the while wondering what happened to Howard, since he was to drive me to the hospital. Finally, just as I was deciding to drive myself, I heard his footfall on the stairs and he arrived and made himself a very large breakfast. I watched the time ticking by, conscious of it getting later and later as I watched him eat. I busied myself with small projects and finally told him I’d wait in the car.

Well, of course the car was completely iced over and the scraper was nowhere to be seen. I turned on the car to warm up the windshield, grabbed a CD case and made limited progress on de-icing the windows. Howard came out eventually and joined me in scraping and finally we had scraped off enough ice to sort of see through the windshield. We got in the car and we were off.

Despite being a few minutes late, I was still the first patient to check in. I needn’t have worried about the time. They didn’t call me until 7:45 because no one gets there (except the receptionist) until at least 7:30. I don’t know why it’s so important to make patients wait unnecessarily, but it seems to be a pattern. OHSU does the same when I’m the first patient of the day. I’m learning not to take it personally. I listened to a book on tape on my media player which was calming.

I was finally called in to have an IV put in for my MUGA scan. Having been blessed with tiny elusive veins, I became a human pincushion as various nurses tried their skills at trying to start an IV. I had only the left arm to offer for the task since I’ve had a mastectomy on the right side and that precludes using the right arm for blood draws and IVs. I needed a blood draw as well, but after so many tries at the IV, the nurse who had achieved it was not about to risk collapsing the vein and so we had to access my port to do the draw. All of this was a lengthy and painful process. Howard witnessed the whole process and was having fits of anxiety. He said that he would have fainted long ago if it were he, and was quite grateful that it wasn’t. The IV finally in (albeit in a painful placement) and blood finally drawn from the port, I was sent to nuclear medicine.

The blood that had been drawn was mixed with radioactive material of some sort and then re-injected back through the IV. This procedure doesn’t sound like it’s terribly good for one’s health. I was instructed to lie very still on a very narrow table for a very long time while the nuclear scientist took picture of how my radioactive blood passed through my heart. The IV site ached the whole time. When he said that the first round hadn't worked and I had to endure another round, I was beside myself. I mentally tapped to bring the pain level down. He said my heart rate was much steadier on the second round so it was good that we did it. Another minor triumph for EFT.

This was the second MUGA scan. The first, done before I had any chemotherapy, established a base line. If this latest one shows no damage to the heart we can continue with chemo. How lovely, just what I want to do (not). The MUGA is a precaution because my mother, who ostensibly died of breast cancer, actually died from heart failure from chemotherapy. I chose a type of chemotherapy that has half the cardio toxicity of the type she had (she had AC which is still the preferred type of chemotherapy). With the type of chemo I'm doing, there's a .5% chance of heart damage. However, I seem to be good at hitting the tiny percentages so it's best to check these things out.

So I won’t know until next week what the verdict is, but I assume it will be fine. I was almost ready to bag the whole procedure after the IV episode. In one way, I’m getting more inured to medical procedures. In another, I’m getting more impatient. I'm less emotionally reactive than I was before. The nurse who finally got the IV in remarked at how nice I was about the whole thing. But I was much more ready to walk out the door and forget about having the MUGA.

The end of chemo, while a milestone, is not the end of treatment. I have five years of hormone therapy beyond that, probably tamoxifen for a couple of years, then arumidex after that. As I’ve never met a pharmaceutical I could endure, this is not a happy prospect. I used to have the illusion that I could somehow meditate myself into better health, but my mental and spiritual powers have not been equal to this disease. I’m having to put my trust in a medical system that isn’t terribly trustworthy, and that is based on a corporate rather than a compassionate model.

I was tired when I got home. I had some complicated tasks to do, trying to make a deadline that turned out to be long past, once I had done more research. Just as well, I suppose. I went to take a walk and realized I was exhausted. It was not a “good” day. I couldn’t make myself exercise, and I suppose that’s okay. This period of my life is not about discipline, it’s about muddling through until better times.