Earthrise from the dark side of the moon.

Strange journeys, and slow. Occasionally a random tinkly arpeggio penetrates the thick barrier of wet felt, sweater pill, and static electricity that surrounds my head, cakes my eardrums, and turns my brain into the kind of crumbly sludge that not even a six year old would want to sled in. I look up to identify its source, and find that it is coming from a little yellow fish. There must be a camera trained on a fish tank somewhere, and when a DVD ends, this is where the tuner defaults. Was somebody watching a movie?

I have been in the hospital for, oh, about four nights I guess? But I certainly can’t figure out why everyone else seems so sure about it. After two sleepless nights at the hotel of belly pain, one of them involving vomissements and copious libations of sweat onto my pillow and sheets, it was time to stop pretending that I was going to make it through this without being hospitalized.

While I was already on quite incredible numbers of prophylactic anti-badstuff, when I got in they put me on even more. So now I am on vancomycin, fluconazole, levaquin, acyclovir, meropenem, cephalexin, cllindamycin skin cream, and chlorhexidine mouthwash! If you don’t immediately have a reaction to those two words next to each other, don’t worry about it. And I STILL have had a fever for days now. Everything’s just out of whack, and regaining its equilibrium is slow. They’ve even got me on IV nutrition, which is a trip. I can feel my guts going “wait a minute, no, no, no, you’ve got it ALL wrong, this stuff is supposed to be on THAT side!” It is easy to point to the drugs as causing the problem (“Hey Ahmet! All these American Hummers hangin around here, eh, you think they are really here lookin out for our best interest? Cause I ain’t so sure all of a sudden.”), but in my case, the peacekeepers really are the good guys, and are doing their job, and are going to win, with the help of the locals, who have started to rally. Tumor markers are in the normal range. My white counts are no longer dropping, and are expected to be back on their daily doubling curve by tomorrow. Platelet and red cell infusions have also sped the process, and further complicated filling out future health-related paperwork.

I was put on oxycodone as needed, and then a morpine drip, and then a morphine PCA (patient-controlled administration: the famous button!), and then a fentanyl PCA, which I had to ask them to turn down, because every time I would hit it I would wake up on another planet. I have been having great little nonsensical hallucinations, though. 10:00! Well, that’s when we cigar smoking three-piece-suit wearing railroad tycoons take our mid-morning nap, now isn’t it ol’chap? Off to the University of Chicago it is! Chicago or bust!

I don’t feel like I sleep much, but surely I do, as there is no other way to account for the time. Reading gets done at about a quarter of a page a day. Movies are best when they involve little dialogue, because there is nothing my brain does worse these days than decoding a bunch of people screaming at each other caught on poor recording equipment and played through tiny speakers on the other side of the room. The narcotics dictate a schedule of their own, and that combined with my recent severe drop in hearing acuity means that things are edgy – I sometimes have no warning when a nurse or my mother is going to do something, and I jump out of my skin in fright. I have to tell all my nurses and doctors that they have to speak slowly and clearly if then want to be understood, but they all forget anyway. I can’t really listen to my own music, because I fall asleep when I put it on, and then am awoken disorented and startled when the theme changes. Phone conversation is equally difficult, so I apologize if you’ve caught me ignoring your calls. I am not often in a communicative mental state, and even when I am, the effort to decode what you are saying and generate phrases of my own can literally put me out of breath. But this will all pass, and soon. And then I’ll do it again!