Yesterday Joe drove me to my clinic appointment. I put on a pair of nice black pants, a purple T-shirt, purple sweater and black jacket. I ate my breakfast of cereal and blueberries and then, in case I threw up, grabbed the blue bag in which the newspaper had been delivered. I've continued to vomit on and off, some days not at all and sometimes twice a day.
We were about halfway there, and on time, when I felt that I might be sick. I tried to stop it by taking deep breaths, but there was no way. I grabbed the bag and lost my breakfast in it. But I hadn't realized the bag had a couple of little holes in it. I didn't know what to do. It was coming out of the holes and going all over my clothes and onto the car. Luckily, Joe had a better bag in the back seat; he reached back and got it. So I got bag number 1 into bag number 2, and at least that was the end of the leaking.
I tried to mop up with napkins, but the car fared better than I did. Since we pass Diane's on the way to the clinic, I called to see if she could lend me some clothes. Of course she said yes. In my shrunken state I'm quite a bit smaller than she is, but I found a pair of pants that I could wear if I rolled the waistband over a few times. I found a shirt too.
I didn't match anymore – gold pants, white shirt and purple sweater. But I had learned a lesson: Always check a bag for holes before throwing up in it.
The clinic visit didn't exactly put a smile on my face. My platelets, which had climbed into the teens and twenties, were back down at 8. I was disappointed, because if they stay higher I can decrease visits to once a week, and I was also a little spooked. Could it be a sign of relapse? (Melissa said no, everything looked fine, and platelets can bounce around.)
I knew my hematocrit would be low, and at 25 it was. My white count was stable at 5.8, although it went down from 7.1, where it was a few weeks ago. It always makes me nervous when that particular number goes down at all, but both Melissa and Dr. Alyea assured me that it is fine where it is. Meanwhile, Dr. Alyea said I should have an endoscopy to try to figure out the cause of the nausea and vomiting, so that is in the works.
I went on to get two bags of platelets and two bags of blood, closing the place down after 7 p.m. Diane had said she'd drive me home, and I felt bad that it got so late, but she didn't seem to mind.
The patient next to me in the infusion room was getting chemo for lymphoma. I couldn't see him, because the curtain between us was pulled, but I could hear him telling his story, loudly, to his nurse. He said he had had a tumor on his pancreas that was causing him to lose weight and have weakness in his legs. (I'm not sure how this works, but this is what he said.)
I immediately got "hijacked." "When they do the endoscopy, will they discover that pancreatic cancer his been causing my similar symptoms"? I asked myself.
I told myself that I have been tested so much that such a thing would have been discovered. Then I talked to Emily on the phone. "He was probably eating and losing weight. You are not eating much and you are throwing up." Oh. I wanted to pull the curtain back and ask him, "Hey, were you eating when this happened?"
Then I talked to Jeanne. "Haven't you had enough problems without picking more up from other people? You don't have pancreatic cancer." Oh, right.
Today I did the more sensible thing, which is, instead of just asking around, I talked to my nurse. We were on the phone talking about scheduling the endoscopy, and I told her my thought pattern and asked if she thought I might have pancreatic or some other cancer.
No, she said. She told me what I had told myself, that I have been tested and scanned and nothing like that has shown up.
It's hard when you're in that infusion room next to someone who talks loudly about his or her symptoms. Next time maybe I should bring an iPod.
