The Red Bag of Chemage
It’s been two chemo cycles since my last entry. Feels like there should be more, because there should be more. Getting my blood and platelet levels to line up at the right time becomes more and more of a cat-herding situation each cycle. We’ve asked a lot of my marrow, so I can’t get too upset, but it has meant treatment delays. That doesn’t mean things haven’t been eventful.
For instance, I went to the Emergency Room for the first time in nearly three decades. They call it the Emergency Department now, which makes sense, since it’s a whole bunch of rooms. There may be one particularly important Emergency Room (Oh Hai, Patient), but I was not in that one. If not for the pesky cancer, there would have been no visit at all. That’s not a luxury I get these days.
It was either a 24-hour stomach virus or food poisoning. Give my unexotic food palate, the former was more likely. Whatever the source, it brought wrath-of-god-level expulsion for a full night. At one point on my bathroom floor, I hallucinated Linda Blair from The Exorcist floating above me, giving a slow clap of respect. Usually, this would be something to ride out with ginger ale and ice chips, but this event left no doubt by dawn that a hospital visit was in the cards. Apparently, Tuesday morning is an ideal time to go the ED, as there were very few patients, and otherwise idle techs fought over me (at least in my head they did) to get all the necessary tests run. Four hours and a few bags of fluids later, I was back home and mumbling vengeance against the unseen foe. Unsurprising, this delayed treatment. Like having a tornado hit while still cleaning up from an earthquake.
Once I get to Camp Chemo, things progress smoothly. The FOLFIRI dehydration remains strong and arid, leading to some other secondary symptoms I won’t get into today. On the flip side, nausea is off the radar most of the time, there’s definitely less of it to deal with than at any point during 20 Gemzar/Cisplatin treatments. Still two more cycles (I think) before the next scans cautious optimism remains the Soup of the Day.
Enough medical jargon, BAG UPDATE. I searched online for an appropriately unique and offbeat bag to hold my 46-hour home treatments. You can get fanny packs customized for anything these days, although 90% of the business seems directed toward sassy bridesmaids. Nothing really stood out to me, and I turned in desperation to wild lands unknown: Etsy. There, I found my bag. That’s not technically correct, since Etsy isn’t a physical place. But Bulgaria sure is.
To call Cold War Bulgaria an uncertain place is understatement. At one time or another, they were on good terms and bad terms with every player on the map, it seems. For this story’s purpose, the important event is that at some point in the 1970s, the Soviets stocked a warehouse near Sofia with a bunch of military sundries. And then… nothing. Decades passed, the U.S.S.R. fell apart, the warehouse was abandoned. Eventually, the warehouse’s contents sold at auction, an entrepreneur bought some lots, put them on the web, and that’s how I’ve ended up with a Soviet messenger bag for my chemo after weeks of postal limbo and odd routing.
I like this bag’s history. Created for a darker purpose, forgotten for decades, then rediscovered and repurposed for a more noble role. A role that led to its presence at a Ugly Christmas Sweater Karaoke Party. The Reds never saw that coming.
Last year, in the world of weird self-challenges that this journey has helped me develop, I did stand-up comedy the same day I had chemotherapy. This time, I went and sang karaoke WHILE getting chemotherapy. As the pump pushed FOLFIRI through my bloodstream, I pumped out some fair-to-middlin’ Robert Earl Keen. It was fun, the crowd was kind, and another item was checked off a list that doesn’t exist until I think of new creations for it.
And the creation will continue. For the final song of the year, a band that provided a driving beat when needed. We’re almost 20 months into this journey and we can’t stop now.
