November 21: On the Road

It has been long since our last entry because chemotherapy is a long and, when one is lucky, monotonous process. Not so much in itself, since that weekly, Thursday needle in Napanee has become the highlight of my active life. One never knows what the needle will do to you, no matter how many times you've tried to strategize around it. But even for the better weeks between the injections, the days have their own, set physiognomy and not much change is to be expected. Thursday is the day of the injection and of 32 steroid and another of these cocktail chemo pills, to which we must add the daily 14 or so, depending on whether nausea or insomnia raise their heads. Once a month, the IV bone strengthening medication, which is to be taken for the next two years, together with steroids, and possibly those 3 antiviral, antibacterial antibiotics, the huge daily pills I most dislike. Imagine that, with all this chemistry doing its work in one's belly, which gets harder, bigger and bigger in order to accommodate those reactions, little energy is left for the goings on in the world. To the every morning question, "what are you going to do today?", the head says, sleep. And sleep I do, most of the time, when the head calls for it by simply shutting my tearful eye. Yes, one of the many secondary effects, tearful eyes uninterrupted. Hard to keep them open, impossible to read, to write, to look around at one's leisure. Never have I understood better those elderly who cry permanently, until now it was only a matter of, yes, appearance.

Since the weather has turned cooler, though, I find things are easier. No more drenching waves of perspiration, cutting my hair short has also helped, my hair has completely changed texture, I was told it would thin out and it did. By the end of the summer, in less than two months I had gained about twenty pounds, and I had to get used to carrying all that new weight and sleep on it, hours on end. It is one thing to acquire weight in time, and I am no stranger to that phenomenon, another, to just have it dropped on you overnight. The first months of this chemotherapy I had to wake up in the middle of the night and eat, at that time I was taking steroids four times a week, four times the ten pills, the doctor was surprised to see that I have not developed diabetes, the natural consequence of that onslaught.

Yet, in spite of the quantities of sweets I inhaled, just to get rid of the bitterness of the medication which, at night, requires to be tasted and appreciated for the poison it is, I did not yet develop the diabetes which haunted my father's life. And one month into the treatment, I had already reached some sort of remission, the numbers lowered to normal, the cancer retreating, it was what these numerical measurements indicate. The rest felt the same or worse, plenty of back pain which sent me, you guessed, to bed, every two hours or so. Yet we certainly did not interrupt the treatment, which will only come to its, possibly provisional end, in a couple of weeks, because we need to prepare for the transplant to come. Stem cell transplant, the making or the breaking, if only for a while, of this ongoing saga of unrelenting symptoms.

That transplant will happen in the beginning of the new year, January and February, at the Kingston hospital. It is for that intervention, now the standard treatment for this type of cancer in Ontario (I was told, sternly, because yes, I have tried to wiggle my way out of it, only to find out that the alternative is chemotherapy uninterrupted, into the future, whatever far or near that may take you), it is in light of those coming weeks of highly pitched biotechnological intervention, supported by shock chemotherapy six times the intensity of the one that I have already undergone, that the past five months get their full usefulness. To keep the cancer at its lowest levels, so that the killing of it, of these undying waves of burgeoning tumors, should be easier to accomplish. We get three weeks free of injection, which seems like a holiday, during the holidays.

This for the medical aspect of our life. We, of course, are used to make the best of it by now. Every Thursday morning we go for a forty minute drive, along the lovely country roads between Belleville and Napanee. We have been assigned to a satellite cancer clinic my doctor oversees there, just so we do not have to drive to Kingston, further away. At the beginning I was not happy, since Kingston does offer a few advantages to the cancer traveller. Pan Chancho and its pastries, olives, vegetarian turkey, being first. But we still get to go there, anyhow, once a month, for our doctor's visit. In Napanee, I have found a pleasant nurse who is half Irish half French, so we get to speak French and that helps. We laugh and carry on. A nuisance for the other nurses and patients, but what of it. Colin gets the half day off, and we certainly enjoy the ride to and fro. Many years ago, when Felix was still with us, we used to go often to Kingston to visit our friends, and we would stop on the way - we took the picturesque roads, in order to avoid the 401 - in front of a church whose parking lot was always empty at those hours, and where we would go for a walk with the dog around the church, to the back, into the lovely, equally deserted cemetery behind it. Felix would have some water, we, maybe a sandwich, he, some of that too, and on we went. There was no imagining how familiar this route would become, so many years later, neither what kind of familiar, what kind of heartening and disheartening at once.

I can say that for the last five months I have come very close to living the life of our dog and cat. Rocky has ceased to change beds, it is the big one he's occupying now, since there's always, or almost, company there. That's me, after the morning walk, after lunch, after the afternoon walk, and early at night. Alice has my company at night, when I cannot sleep for more that a couple of hours at a time. I come into the living room to do my exercises, or to walk around the table, or to have some sorbet, and she requires her water treat. The faucet opened just enough for her to receive this bounty of the cold running stream on her neck for what seems like a long while, all the while drinking from under it.

As for the holidays glistening just around the corner, we wish you to enjoy thoroughly all the good they have to offer. We thank all the wonderful thoughts which come so often our way, messages I have unfortunately so rarely been able to respond to in due time. Be sure that, in spite of that silence, we do rely on your presence in our life, and on your concern.