Fungible Convictions

No, not me. This time it was Lindsay at the Brigham E.R. She’ll all good now, but she had some pretty awful stomach pain. (We know 95% for sure what caused it, and it’s a little gross, so I won’t explain it here.)

What make Lindsay the most uncomfortable wasn’t as much the pain but being back in an emergency room that was the scene of this two years ago. Of course I don’t remember it, but when she checked in today, the nurse said, “Whitacre? Have you been here before?”

Because in New York, they’re just givin’ them away!

My wife’s cousin in NY has been in and out of the hospital with diverticulitis and had a chunk of himself removed, only to find out that the complications that followed surgery were actually from an infected catheter.

Meanwhile, Paraneoplastic Buddy’s boyfriend, also in NY, wrote on Facebook that he “is kvelling, because S. is coming home Friday afternoon after successful surgery this morning to remove the infected catheter.”

Meanwhile-meanwhile, coworker Dan is apparently headed for surgery for appendicitis after thinking for days he had the stomach flu.

On the plus side, Katie and Joe have (this time 100% officially) given birth to beautiful though lumpy AS-YET-STILL-UNNAMED baby boy. Good job, Katie!

When I opened my eyes this morning, the sky was yellow. Not the sun, because it was overcast and a little rainy. The sky was literally yellow. I got a reply-tweet from an MIT student who confirmed she saw the same thing:

@akwhitacre Glad I’m not crazy. I spent a while wondering if my eyes were going wonky.

The weirdness of the yellow sky captures the mood today, because I’m watching my wife get one piece of weird news after another. Her father found out he has five herniated disks. Her cousin went to the hospital and was diagnosed with diverticulitis and may need surgery. She checked Newsday to find out a) a woman was beaten a couple blocks from the church where we were just married and b) an old classmate of hers has gone missing.

I pray for healing backs, healthy colons, a lot of justice, and a safe return. But mainly I pray that I don’t see that yellow sky again.

So I’ve got some sort of condition where my short-term memory doesn’t function as it should.

That was my first public comment on cancer, written a year ago from my hospital bed on the neurology floor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In nearby rooms were people recovering from strokes, brain injuries, and other attacks on the central nervous system, all of them terrifying.

It was written a few days after my admission to the Brigham. The day of my admission, I’d been to four places. First, my office. It was a Monday. That weekend, my fiancee Lindsay and I had been to New York to make our wedding plans. And on that Monday, I couldn’t remember anything about the weekend. Continue reading

Lindsay pointed out yesterday that I hadn’t re-recorded my office phone voicemail greeting since I returned to work last fall. My whole family had been calling me Tom Waits back then, because of how raspy my voice was, but jeebus, in that greeting I sounded even worse than Smoky McBagpipes.

Tomorrow I’ll have an EEG to see if I can go off my very last med, which was only tangentially related to everything else. The upside is that it’s a good story, that I’d be going off that last pill right around the anniversary of going to the hospital last July. The downside is that, starting today, I’m not allowed to sleep until 10am tomorrow: for the EEG to be accurate, I have to be as sleep-deprived as I was last year at this time. (They also said something about how I need to be really tired to guarantee that I’ll fall asleep during the EEG itself, but I don’t need to stay up all night to do that—I fell asleep during my last MRI, and you know how loud those things are.)

Anyway, give me a call at work and I promise I won’t pick up.

One of the side-effects of chemo is that it knocks down your white blood cell counts, and if the count is too low, your next session gets delayed. That’s what happened to me last week—what was supposed to be my second session last Tuesday got put off until yesterday.

Such a thing is pretty common but doesn’t happen to everybody. So now that the docs know it happens to me, I had two options . . . go back to the doctors office the day after chemo for a white cell booster shot, or get a preloaded shot I could give myself.

I opted for the latter and gave myself a shot today. Obviously the convenience of not going into the doctor’s office play a role, but the bigger motivation for doing it myself was something from when I was a kid—namely the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I saw my grandfather, a diabetic, check his blood sugar and inject himself with insulin. I figured if he could do that a couple times a day, every day, for decades, I can poke myself a measly ten times between now and the end of chemo.

Plus now I get to have a little plastic biohazard trash bin in my apartment, heh.

I don’t know if these are perks or just things to be thankful for, but boy does it pay to get cancer treatment in the Boston area. I had my first session of chemo Tuesday, and, except for the split-second ickiness of getting the IV in, it was downright pleasant. I give all the credit for that to the staff—not only was I physically comfortable for the 3-4 hours of therapy, but they let me have plenty of food and company available. My guess is that they’re so good at this because the majority of their patients don’t have the ridiculous support network I do—or perhaps not even the positive prognosis I do. But anyway, they’re just so good at what they do, in part, I guess, because they deal with cases much more demanding than mine.

Add to that how easy it is for family to temporarily set up shop in the same town, how supportive the Boston university community is in watching out for their employees (thanks again, Tufts!), there’s just so much to be thankful for, even though there are still enough antibodies partying in me to keep me awake for good chunks of the night and even though my memory is still impaired.

Every day is better than the one before, and that trend has remained unreversed since surgery last month. So here’s looking forward to continued improvement!

Today’s the 9th, so it’s obviously been a while since I posted last about this illness. For those interested, all’s going well. I’ve been home almost a week, with my dad’s having moved into the guest room so that my fiancee can go to work as usual and needn’t worry about me, at least not unnecessarily.

The memory is making a slow comeback. What’s interesting to me is how it’s all in there, except perhaps the earliest days of my hospital stay. I could look at pics of my doctors and know who’s who; I can tell you just about anything about recent events if given just a little context; and I’m 100% aware of what my medical problem is—specifically, cancer of the thymus, my body’s youthful exuberance in making way WAY too many antibodies to fight the cancer, and those extra antibodies’ floating up to block the part of my brain responsible for short-term memory. At this point, since I’ve already had the thymoma cut out, we’re just waiting for my body to chill. Unfortunately, since it’s cancer, I’ll still have to go through six months of chemo—I’ll be in the market for hair and can’t stand to give my father the satisfaction of my being bald younger than he was, despite circumstances—but that treatment is essentially divorced from my memory’s recovery, which is a good thing. The chemo’s there to obliterate any cancer cells, but with the tumor very, very gone, it’s merely a matter of time for my memory to improve, which it has been immediately following the surgery but with still a long way to go.

And it’s worth saying, the messages coming in from everywhere have been an enormous help. Friends, family, readers even. It’s been wonderful getting support from every corner.

PS: Don’t forget to sail on the HMS Foreshadowing.

So I’ve got some sort of condition where my short-term memory doesn’t function as it should. The doctors say I have a tumor in my thymus gland (in my chest) coupled with/related to paraneoplastic syndrome, which is what affects my memory. I’ve been in the hospital since Monday, July 16th. I’m surrounded by family and curious doctors–there’s nothing all that common about my condition, so there’s a lot to learn by both sides.

I’m surprised I haven’t already started posting to FC about this, since each day I could read it and maybe recall more about what’s going on.

Either Monday or Tuesday, they’re going to take out the tumor, so I’ve got more to do and more to forget in the meantime. I’m told that a byproduct of my immune system’s fighting the tumor is that it’s also attacking the part of my brain set for memory. The theory is that by removing the tumor, my memory will return to normal, but that’s only the supposition—it’s not guaranteed, so only time will tell.

I haven’t posted a word since February, and I haven’t been reading. I’d always found reading and writing to be frustrating processes; they demand change. With work busy in the springtime, my fiancee’s moving in, friends’ weddings taking up the weekends, etc., etc., I simply wasn’t interested in mental change, in challenging my brain.

But wouldn’t you know it, I’m most assuredly getting dumber. Since I stopped reading and writing in the spring, I’m not as creative, thoughtful, or patient. And double those deficiencies because of a two-month-plus bout with insomnia—by taking Ambien I’m physically rested but not mentally, and my short-term memory is entirely shot.

My fiancee thinks the insomnia comes from stress, and she might be right in the sense that the longer the insomnia lasts, the less I’m able to process a day’s happenings and the more likely I am to be overwhelmed. But what hadn’t occurred to me until this week is that by not reading and writing, I’m cheating myself out of another method of processing life’s information.

So here’s a post. It’s not detailed and doesn’t refer to much. But maybe by getting back in the writing habit, I can stave off stupidity for just a bit longer.