Tumors and races

My 5k is on Saturday! Less than a week away! Although I still have a long way to go, I see my body being transformed by running.

Wait.

Scratch that qualifier, "although I still have a long way to go". Adina has practically spent our whole relationship trying to get me to say nice things about myself without throwing in a backhanded insult in the same breath. There's no need to bring myself down here. I guess when I do that I want people to know that I don't think I am immodest or delusional. Like if I say my body is transforming, maybe somebody will think that I believe I look like Uta Pippig, the winner of the Boston Marathon, who incidentally crapped herself during the race. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Yep, take a moment to laugh.

So, anyway.

I have a new "primary" patient at work. That means that whenever I work I have him. We've been taking on more patients lately who have residual disease or active disease, and my patient D's tumor keeps growing even while he is getting his Busulfan prep (a chemo to kill the bone marrow). It's actively strangling him. He is only 27 years old. I am hopeful that when he gets the Cytoxan part of his prep, which is another chemo with strong anti-cancer properties, he will feel better quickly. His father is his bone marrow donor, which means that once D gets the transplant, his dad's immune system will be fighting against D's aggressive tumor forever. It's like the ultimate gift. I imagine little dad immune cells dressed up like knights at the Renaissance Faire with swords, and they are all lined up ready to charge at these big globby cancer cells. What more could you ask for when you look at your sick child, when most parents would feel helpless, and know that a part of you will live inside your child, circulate in their bloodstream, and defend against sickness and pain. It is so beautiful.



-- Posted from my iPhone

Completion

I also considered titling this post "Hallelujah", but mostly because I was listening to that song by Leonard Cohen. Both titles speak to the same feeling that I am carrying at the moment. There are tears behind my heart about seeing my family this week. A contemplative, quiet exuberance fills me and, oops, guess those tears are more in front than I realized. So much healing has happened and I do feel like a whole person now. My mom and stepdad actually enjoy spending time with Adina and me, and the simple act of laughing with them, all of us laughing and enjoying each others' company, did more to bond us than any serious conversation could have.

Reuniting with my sister has ignited tinder in me that I was not aware of. I feel so much love for her!!! I keep thinking of fun things we could do together.
I feel like mama hen in a way, which maybe I don't have the right to feel, but I just wanna wuv her and hug her and be weird with her forever and ever!





-- Posted from my iPhone

I have a past and a family!

What to say. I met my family for the first time in 11 years this weekend. I was expecting a great deal of tension and weirdness but actually things have so far melted into place. Adina and I have so far spent two days with them and we are headed into a third day today for a latke extravaganza. I had not cried until Sunday, when my sister Danika and I had a lengthy walk'n'talk. I think it was weirdest for me to see her, since we had had no contact with each other since I left. She said she did not remember me really, which was hard to hear. I like her though. She seems reserved, although I totally get the need to keep yourself reserved in the presence of a dominating personality. I definitely was reserved at home, and I think that's why I went a little crazy at the end of high school and the start of college (see: smoking pot, pumpkin burning, burnt peep curtain, etc.). I am really excited to get to know her better and I hope she wants to learn things about me as well.

I have had countless dreams about meeting her over the past decade, most of which involve a variation on that awful theme of having to go back to high school to complete some class or another that I forgot to take. In those dreams, I disrupt classroom after classroom looking for her, but since I don't know what she looks like, I cannot find her. Two months ago, I never would have imagined that Adina and I would be picking her up from school and hanging out, all with the blessing of mom and Pete. I feel like I am floating in a dream.

I can't wait to post pictures of some of Pete's artwork that he gave Adina and me. It is really awesome and I hope he starts to sell it on Etsy.com.

Anyone want to help me determine the difference between a creed and a credo? Thanks!

-- Posted from my iPhone

A pox upon me

I feel diseased. My fellow staff members and even our resident back away in fear and disgust. My leprosy has made me an outcast in the only place I belong.

Actually, my cultures are negative so far, but my patient today had shingles and her culture didn't come back positive until 10 days out. I prolly wouldn't care except I have a new yuckster on my arm and I'd like to know if I should be out of work again. I called my hookup in derm and she said it didn't sound like anything to worry about.

My patient today is intubated and she asked me for some funny hospital stories/drama/gossip. The best I could come up with was to tell her about The Don, who was her "doctor" for a while. She was cracking up and told me that she did not like him because he kept waking her up at zero:dark:thirty and "manhandling" her, so she told him never to touch her again. HA! And yet, she said, he was still her doctor but would just talk to her from the door and never examine her. Niiiiiice.

Picture of my cat.


-- Post From My iPhone

Back from the dead

Well I am at the doctors office again, having my pox looked at. The past 5 times or so that I have been here I have had to wait for over an hour to be seen. My doctor is a friend of mine and is also an old family friend, but Adina says I should switch over to her doctor since she never has to wait. Is it wrong to switch doctors because of administrative problems? Take my poll and let me know what you think.


-- Post From My iPhone

Meatwad

Gawsh it has been ages since I blogged. I am at work, of course. I have this patient who has HIV-related lymphoma and is the gayest little thing I have seen in a while. And he is the kind of guy that you see last because you know he will keep you in there for as long as you'll take. I mean, not once has he said that he is done with me today. I have always had to find an out, usually after he says something crazy and inappropriate and I laugh, back away, and say, "that's it, I'm out!" And when I say, ok, I gotta go see my other patients, which is a lie because my trainee has the other patients, he says, "where you goin'?" He dragged me in there to watch cartoons with him earlier.

He spent a long time talking about God today, and how God had delivered him from himself and all this stuff, and he got all teary-eyed with joy about God and I wish that stuff like that permeated me more. It is nice to have a patient that leaves you with a smile and a positive feeling, even if he is a PITA.

Untitled no. 2

I don't know where to start. What I can say is that I find myself being bored with stability. I mean, my life circumstances are in flux, there is a great deal of uncertainty about my medium and long term future, and so on. But my internal life has been relatively calm for about a month or so, maybe more. I find that I yearn for the ups and downs that I am used to. I am not accustomed to this kind of predictability. It scares me sometimes. I am definitely able to have a range of emotion, but sometimes I worry that I am not feeling enough.

Part of this blog project is compiling information about my feelings and experiences so that I can write a book. I also am working on getting these feelings and experiences into words, sentences, and complete thoughts. Often I find it difficult to do so. I remember the experience of writing when I was younger; my best work was borne of turbulence, I often would write a lot in a storm of passion and rarely edited what I produced. Of course, I would guess that teenage and early adult writing in a many cases comes from a place of emotional drama. Now when I want to put down a thought, I have to first get over this wall of vapor that siphons my thoughts and feelings away the moment I decide to give them voice. That sometimes happens when I just start writing stuff. Often I can't cross that wall.