No one can save me from...myself
After ten days of extreme fatigue, yesterday my energy came back, and the various medicines I was prescribed started working. I wouldn't say I felt healthy, but energy can make up for a whole lot of things.
Of course, I wanted to make up for lost time, so I started cleaning immediately. I even pulled out the vacuum cleaner and started moving furniture in the living room, determined to transform the place before Kathy got home. It was sort of a, "Look, I'm all better!" attempt. This went fine until I moved a small round table with a thick marble top. The marble top lifted up as I moved it and then slammed back down on my finger.
OW!
You know how sometimes, when you hurt yourself, you feel like you are going to faint or throw up from the shock and pain? It was like that. Omigoodness.
So, did I stop what I was doing and put ice on my finger? Certainly, that's what a sensible person would have done, so…no. I did not. I decided that the best thing to do was to distract myself from the pain, so I immediately began cooking dinner and tidied up some more. I tried holding ice on my finger, but it was too hard to do that while moving about the kitchen.
When Kathy arrived home, we set up for dinner in the living room. I had been wanting to watch Joe Vs. the Volcano--I haven't watched the movie in years and I just had a hankering to see it. We put on the DVD and started watching. I tried to eat…but the site of my finger, hugely swollen and darkly purple, turned my stomach and couldn't swallow anything. I tried talking about this and that (like how I thought we should cancel our premium cable channels because we never watch them) but finally I realized that I needed to stop trying to eat and go lie down. I went downstairs to lay on my Loveseat of Languishing and took a pain reliever.
Kathy came downstairs in a little bit to check on me. I had turned on the TV in the studio, surfed through the channels, and what did I find? Joe Vs. the Volcano! Conveniently, the movie picked up shortly after where I left off from the DVD upstairs. The fact that I was watching this on HBO did not slip past Kathy. "It's a SIGN," she said. "We're keeping the premium channels!"
Feeling vindicated in her defense of premium cable programming, she turned her attention back to me. I was still having trouble with ice cubes, so Kathy swung into MacGyver mode. "You have Otter Pops in the freezer, don't you?" I nodded (they are useful when I can't drink water after chemo). She went to the freezer and called out over her shoulder, "Which ones won't you eat?" I laughed and answered, "The grape ones are gross!"
She returned with two grape Otter Pops. Putting one Otter Pop on each side of my finger and wrapping it with a paper towel, she formed an ice splint that she taped together. Voila! How's that for ingenuity?
The irony of all this is that I spent hours during chemo with my hands and feet covered with ice, in an attempt to protect them from the ravages of Taxotere. What I forgot was that there is no treatment to protect my hands and feet from me! I'm more of a danger to myself than chemo will ever be.
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