Three cheers for a driver who wasn't too bad

Last week when I got to Dana-Farber for ECP, aka the light treatment on my blood, I thought my blood pressure would be high because I was drinking a Cumberland Farms coffee with one of their caffeine shots.

Coffee snobs take notice: They have good dark roast coffee. I am one of them and I was surprised.

My blood pressure was actually fine.

“Must have been the driver,” I said to my nurse.

That’s because I was the driver,  and unless you count my internal monologue, there was nothing to upset me.

The drivers in general have been OK lately. More opportunity for calm, less fodder for writing. I’ll take the calm.

I drove myself because there were too many connecting points to trust a ride service to get me there on time.

On Wednesday I had ECP at Dana-Farber. Then dinner and sleepover at Diane and David’s, followed Thursday morning by back-to-back dermatology appointments at a Brigham and Women’s outpost at 850 Boylston Street. Then down to Dana-Farber for an 11 a.m. checkup with Melissa, then to the Cheesecake Factory at the Chestnut Hill Mall for lunch with a good friend. (I would say an OLD friend but that sounds like the friend is aged, whereas he is old as having known him for a long time, since college.)

Dr. Lin, who takes care of the surface of my skin, zapped many small squamous cell cancers on my face, neck, arms and legs. When you hear squamous cell cancer, you think, out, out, damn spot, but they grow slowly and aren’t large enough to need surgical removal. 

She does the cryosurgery with a softer touch than the overzealous Fellow in another office who zapped several areas so hard that I got blisters. (I told her about it and she said that if you overdo it, you leave scars, which is what happened on one of my hands.)

She wants me to apply Efudex, the chemotherapy cream, to these same areas. It agitates the cancers so that they turn red and angry and decide they don’t want to live with you anymore.

I actually just wrote a story, not yet published, about the side effects of Efudex, generic name Fluorouracil. I feel like I have no choice but to use it. The spots are red enough already and I don’t want them to get worse before I go to California next week for a wedding. She said it’s OK to wait.

They were going to make me get dressed and go across the hall to see Dr. Liu, who specializes in subcutaneous dermatology and is in  charge of the treatment for my graft vs. host disease of the skin. (That’s the ECP that I’ve been doing for two years.) But they relented and let her come to me. 

She wants me to continue getting the treatment every other week. It’s making my skin softer, though not less lumpy. Just because it’s fun to add one more thing, she wants me to go to physical therapy to try to increase the flexibility in my hands and wrists. The rest of me has gotten more flexible, but my hands and wrists are getting more tight.

Where “normal” people can put their hands in prayer position and lift their elbows, I can barely lift them at all. And when I try to place them flat on the floor in yoga, one almost makes it but the other is cupped. This is hard on my wrists, and makes a poor foundation for my down dog. Sometimes I use blocks...but that is another story.

She set it up in the Boston area, but when they called, I asked if they thought anyone in Western Massachusetts could do it. The person on the phone said yes, it would be possible, as long as I found someone listed on the website of the Hand Therapy Certification Commission, or HTCC.org.

It turns out there are many, including in Amherst, at the Valley Medical Group. 

Another opportunity to ask, who knew?

I don't listen to many audiobooks, but friends recommended Bruce Springsteen reading his autobiography, Born to Run,  and it made the two days of on an off driving much easier. One of the reviewers called it exhilarating, and it definitely was. It took my mind off skin cancer and up tight hands and all that.