Night

Can't sleep, guess I'll blog.

Food is weird. Annabelle says I use the word weird too much. I guess it's evidence of lazy thinking or talking, or just another bad habit I have like picking on my nails. I am in the mode lately though of just accepting my bad habits instead of changing them. So I like that word right now to describe my relationship with food. The chemical sludge that has entered me in its terribly unfriendly manner has really put in a wrench in my life long love affair with crunchable meltable chewy formerly delicious and life-giving food, which formerly I found truly delicious and life-giving. I did. Now, even though, here at the tail end of round two, where I am starting to re-pixelate into some approximation of Amydom, I find that I am not quite. I am. Not quite. I am eating and drinking (of course - I'd be damn dead if not) but it's still off and that is disconcerting.

A lot of stuff that I used to like to eat feels weird now. Like the sandwiches in the movie The Langoliers. In the film a plane landed with only a few passengers that had been asleep in flight, and when they woke up almost everyone else on the plane had vanished. Anyone who'd been awake was now GONE. The pilot (who luckily had dozed off) woke up and managed to land in Boston - and the stragglers, dazed, got off. Things looked flatter, sounds sounded tinnier, light looked duller, and the air smelled stale. There were no sounds - no birds or truck sounds, no breeze, no other people anywhere. The light was flat and the colors were muted. Little did they know but they had flown through a space time rip accidentally and had landed in the past by about an hour. So all "events" had already occurred and what was leftover was to be obliterated for all time, just like how our tangible past really is. In the mind of Stephen King (the master), in this story, this meant literally, time/the past was literally to be EATEN by these huge awful loud Pac-Man like tubular worm monsters called The Langoliers. They were coming. They are coming. These hapless fliers of course didn't know this yet....(see the movie - it's a campy trip). So they go into the airport, freaked out by the lack of people or anythingness. One guy tried to eat some sandwiches and beer they found in a diner - but they were not "real" anymore because they were part of the past that was about to be obliterated (dontcha love the mind of Stephen King?) so when that guy put the sandwich in his mouth, he immediately screamed and spit it out - IT TASTED LIKE DUST AND DEATH. That's me.

Food is a bit better than a week ago, but the effects still linger. Some stuff is Toxic Dust Langoliers Food, some stuff is Sorta Fair to Partly Cloudy Food that I can choke down, and some stuff is Sorta More Ok Food that can almost be a little bit tasty now and then. This is no way to be for a former oinkster like me.

Toxic Dust Langoliers Food
Cheese
Spaghetti sauce
Coffee
Chocolate
Gin and tonics - oh the humanity
Alcohol of any kind tho I gamely try
Macaroni and cheese
Waffles and pancakes (never liked just put on here to be a pill)
Bread
Sandwiches
Peanut butter
Spaghetti
Butter
Orange juice
Sour cream
Sprite
Water
Pie filling
Cottage cheese
Yogurt
All other things that you would order on a menu or buy at HEB

Sort of Fair to Partly Cloudy Food I Can Choke Down Mostly
Burned toast
Potatoes with nothing on them
Ginger ale
Chicken
The burned edge of a pie crust
Tangerines
Scrambled eggs
Bacon
Oatmeal

Sorta More Ok Food That Can Almost Be a Little Bit Tasty Now and Then
Frosted mini wheats
Pears
Canned peaches
English breakfast tea
Chicken soup homemade
Salmon
Salad
Pork roast

Another thing that is truly bizarre about this whole food thing is that it's a debate about what to eat when you have cancer or when you are getting chemotherapy. Have you ever noticed that when you break apart the word "therapist" in breaks into "the rapist?" Anyway so here's the thing - cancer cells are just your own body's cells that have a mutation in their deoxyribonucleic acid and ribonucleic acid, both of which have jobs inside your cells to make them replicate and grow. "Divide! Go faster! Get moving you lazy son of a bitch!" they yell at the cell as the boss of the cell. So anyway, cancer is not some thing from outside, it is you. I believe I have said this already so if you are following my blog sorry to bore.

So, we feed our body fuel to feed the cells - that's how we get energy and live. There's all kinds of hoopla about super food, good food, anti-oxidants, green tea sweet potatoes blueberries Japanese food processed food vegan food real food healthy food acai berries omega three fatty acids and stuff. You know this - you hear it read it see it maybe even practice it.

So here's the rub: since your body is made of cells, and we can  all agree that "good" food is "more good" for your cells than "bad crap" - guess what? When you eat antioxidants and healthy food to SUPPORT YOUR BODY (yay you you think) when you have cancer, then that good stuff SUPPORTS THE CANCER CELLS TOO. They love it! They say yes thank you we shall gobble that up, yummy, in fact, guess what -we get it FIRST! Because we are more rapidly dividing thank you very much! Too bad for you!

Fuck.

This is confusing as all get out. There is a raging debate about this in the ONK world (oncology) with MOST falling on the side that says: DO NOT EAT ANTIOXIDANTS AND SUPER SUPPORTIVE FOOD WHEN YOU HAVE CANCER OR WHEN YOU ARE ON CHEMO.

Is this counterintuitive or what?

However, it hardly matters right now. I never knew that my will to eat well, or eat at all, or to even be, AT ALL, would be so hard to maintain. I slid down Amy's Maslow's food hierarchy from top to bottom (you're kinda supposed to go up his thing) like so:
 
Trying to eat super healthy wonderful oh aren't I wonderful food
Trying to eat some items from the category of the world labeled food
Trying to eat part of the edge of a piece of toast
Trying to try to eat something maybe kind of fast so I won't notice much
Trying to try the idea of trying to eat a crumb
Who cares.

So I may be coasting through the next few months on oatmeal fumes with a few peaches and bits of lettuce on the way and I will be happy just to get to the other side. I'll wash it down with lots of English breakfast tea and I'll try to drink 1/8th of the cup before it gets cold.

Today I feel pretty ok. I have chemo again in 9 days and I am seriously thinking about just taking the Taxotere and the Cytoxin (nice name huh?) and dropping the third drug, called Adriamycin. The doctor says it is up to me - this is not comforting at all. However, the Adriamycin is so nasty that she thinks it is the reason that I get so ill that I have to go into the clinic at Seton Northwest each time to get fluids and special fancy anti-disgustingly-sick drugs, and the reason I am flat out dead for 10 days or more. Being so sick that I can barely function for 12 out of 21 days for months is not ok with me. I am not even sure if any chemotherapy is ok with me. This is a therapist I do not like.