Attached and Unattached

Hospital Diary

I feel I have two lives. One at home, and the other at the hospital. At home, I use my legs more, even while using a walker. At the hospital, there is a lot of time spent in bed, attached to the chemo bag that slowly drips into my veins. The schedule there is five days, 24 hours a day, receiving chemo.

Starting this week, it will be my fourth round, and there haven’t been any dramatic changes. My fingers tingle, and there is some numbness in my feet, but that is the only consistent feeling I have through the treatment.

If I’m lucky, I can get a nurse to take me out for a walk in the hallway three times a day—morning, afternoon, and evening. It’s a drag to bring the chemo bag along with us. The big difference from home is that I’m not attached to anything there. I can walk anywhere I want. In the hospital, I even need to call a nurse to go to the bathroom. There is an alarm set on the bed that goes off once I put my feet on the floor.

On April 2, I will go in for a CT scan to locate the cancer and see if the four rounds of chemotherapy have weakened its hold on me.

I feel I need more time to heal while at home, because hospital life doesn’t really allow the time to heal properly. I feel weaker after a hospital stay, and I’m in a different mental state. The only active thing one does is order meals, which I think about constantly while staying at Kaiser. I’ve become familiar with the menu and know which dishes to avoid. Most of the sandwiches are OK—you can add tomato, mustard, pickle, and make it your own—but the pasta is always a disappointment, either swimming in pesto or barely touched by sauce. It can take an hour for the food to arrive, and it’s usually cold by then. I always order ice cream for dessert, and it is always melted by the time it gets to me. After finishing a meal, I start thinking about the next one.

Technically, I’m dealing with a life-and-death issue, but I’m so busy at Kaiser worrying about the quality of the dishes being delivered that I don’t really have the time to think about anything else. In early April, I will get information about what is happening in my body, and I haven’t the foggiest idea what I will think or feel once I get that news. Of course, I hope the cancer gets punched in the face, but there is also the possibility that it gives me a karate hit. I don’t dwell on that.

If the news is bad, I wonder what happens next.