Jailbreak

Little by little I become less bionic and more human. There are fewer and fewer glistening plastic udders dripping questionably welcome drugs into me. One by one, the tubes feeding into my port are being taken away. An amazing feat of biology has been successfully performed: my stem cells have engrafted, and my immune system has reconstituted itself from oblivion. I have one more night in the hospital, a day to pack, and then I fly home on Tuesday!

This has been a very difficult hospital stay, and I am extremely relieved to be getting out of here.

Senses are precious and delicate things. All of mine have been under attack. My ears are worse than they have ever been, to the point that I have trouble understanding my own mother. Music is muffled, and voices on movies or TV are practically unintelligible. If something comes in from the hospital food service, the nauseating smell of the institutional kitchen overwhelms the smell of the food. My feet are numb and cold, I am constantly sweating even when I don’t have a fever. My fingers are numb and feel clumsy. Everything, even water, tastes strange, if not rivolting. Just getting enough calories in is a real challenge, food service or not. My eyes… :

A few nights ago (how many? How to tell? Time slips by in a sweaty smear), I was reading before going to bed, and I noticed that I was having difficulty because there was an after-image (like after looking at a bright light) that wasn’t going away. What was eerie, and then terrifying, was that there were no bright lights in my field of vision – the reading light was behind me. With my fingers clumsy, my feet numb, and my ears screaming, I was primed to assume the worst: that the peripheral neuropathy caused by the chemo had progressed, and had begun to destroy my optic nerve. Thankfully, both intravenous anti-anxiety meds and a consult from opthamology were not too far away (there are good things about being in the hospital). After having my eyes dilated for five hours (during which time I could not only not see anything, but not even listen to music because my ears are so screwy), the opthamologist arrived and quickly diagnosed a retinal bleed. It seems that little tiny breaks in teeny vessels happen to everyone all the time, but get patched up fast enough that they don’t hemorrhage. Since my platelets were so low, when a small vessel in my eye burst, it wasn’t repaired quickly, and enough blood spilled out into the surrounding tissue that it caused a spot on my retina (right in the middle of my right eye’s visual field) to be perceptible. To my great relief and annoyance, I was told that it would go away over a few weeks. Next round, we are going to be doing even more platelet transfusions to hopefully keep this from happening again.

It is difficult to contemplate the next round, even to go so far as to say “only one more to go!”, because I really haven’t gotten over this one yet. The thought of having to do it again is sickening, at this point. I am focused on getting to sitting outside in my parents’ garden, and not much beyond.