Hmmmmm....

Here I am three days from chemo - this is when I'm supposed to feel my best, relatively speaking. Here on day 18 I should be peachy clementine. But guess what? I'm not. I'm not peachy. I'm not refreshed reprieved reliefed. I have come to expect a wonderful vacation, a little oasis of calm in the middle of days that revolve in 21 day increments. I am now wondering if, in addition to the expected days of feeling caskety, if also doing this routine (a difficult tumbling routine) over and over has some kind of unkind cumulative effect, where the more TIMES you cycle through, the less bouncy-backy you get in the last half of the cycle.

Kind of like maybe:

Cycle 1

Chemo day - La la la! New life experience! Hook me up! I feel BUENO! I'm game I'm so game! No freaking biggy!

Days 2-13: Kill me now, are you freaking kidding me? I am so down and sick I am not believing this. Help.

Days 14-20: BOOM SHAKALAKA! Instantly one day I feel better! Let's party with champagne and fine cheeses and loud music and parties! I'm so happy to feel good! Exploding with joy!

Cycle 2

Chemo day: Oh hello there! Rather chatty and hamburgery with pals and icy Coke, lots of playful chatter, feeling fairly up for it, a bit leery but still riding the high of feeling so much better at the end of whatever that last thing was...

Days 2-10: Oh yeah. This again. Kindly ignore the corpse on the couch but hey isn't it super swell that she sorta came back to life in 9-10 days instead of 13?! Yes! Our advice was so wise! Round of back patting. The corpse declines to sit up.

Days 11 -20: Mostly back to life. Maybe let's party with a beer and maybe a bit of pizza. A little tentative. Hollow.

Cycle 3

Chemo day: Well ok I suppose but the fun due to newness has worn the hell off this particular item. Stick me.

Days 2-9: Ugh. Tried some new drugs, well they were ok but not worth a parade or anything, still fell into that poison lake from Harry Potter 6 (I think - the Half Blood Prince) and felt as Dumbledore  did after he drank that horror juice. Shaky. Flattened.

Days 10-20: Mostly came back. Um I'm ok I think. Uh ok I wanna kinda let's party rather quietly with orange juice and Project Runway Allstars who really are the B team but it's ok cuz I feel rather C teamish, streaming eyes, and snarky attitude may be off putting. But still, yeah, I feel better.

Cycle 4 (which I'm ending up presently) - looks are deceiving. Hmmmmmm...

Chemo day: The day after Merry Christmas nice to see the sweet nurses but just the sight of this room gives me the heebie jeebies, hate the dry chemical smell and the white gray mouse walls and the slimy squeaky leatherette chairs and the overflowing toilet over there and the long dark Freddy Kruger hallways and oh yes the bags held high so that gravity can be used as a lever to flood me with $20,000 worth of poison. Me not like. 

Days 2-8: Been there done that but this so-called knowledge and hard earned expertise doesn't help. I'm cut off again and feel like the liverwurst worst sandwich that got stepped on and then the person who stepped on it slipped and kind of wiped out, and as they wiped out the liverwurst sandwich it unceremoniously shot back underneath the fridge and stayed back there behind the refrigerator for five years. It's odd how nobody really noticed it. It's lonely but doesn't want company, it's disgusting and repellent, it's dehydrated but wants no re-enlivening water, it's unrecognizable even to itself and retains no deliciousness. Also I'm very tired and my eyes and stomach twitch a lot a lot like a mouse whisker. Disintegrating. 

Days 9-20: Waaaaaait a sec where's my reprieve? It kind of showed up, but then it rather slinked away, leaving me with a half-pregnant half-stomach 

-flu flavored life. I'm driving around, making dinner, eating dinner, talking and laughing and entertaining and seeming to have fun, but underneath it I'm not quite normal. If could maybe unzip my skin and take it it off, underneath would be a malformed sticky green person. Who I do not like.

Here in the "good" part of the chemo cycle I'm not experiencing the good part much. To whom do I address my complaints?

Everything smells off, in a dried out Hobby Lobby way, mixed with medicine. (I hate shopping at hobby lobby because of the smell). I smell this with my nose, mouth, and eyes, which then repel the onslaught with eye water. It's its own cycle.

I have chemo five in three days, then screamo six in three days plus three weeks. 

Distractions:

Going to the movies with friends. Today I saw August: Osage County, with Rebecca. Well, not starring Rebecca, but actually attending with, and sitting next to, her. Which was quite nice. And the Academy award goes to Julia Roberts, and another one for Meryl Streep. The acting in this was absolutely superb, the comedy as dark as midnight with no stars, the darkest of dark comedy. Some of it was gut-bustingly funny. Some of it was heartbreaking. And I must say I am lucky because I have never ever ever in my entire life been in any family situation that was as dysfunctional as the family that was depicted in this movie. I have never even seen that kind of dysfunction up close and personal, with a few very rare exceptions that totally freaked me out, at other peoples' houses. WOOOO I am lucky.

Reading. Up a storm.

I forgot what else.

To bed.