4/21

For two days after your treatment you are still attached to an IV bag full of medicine. You carry it around in a fanny pack. Every 10 seconds the machine inside the bag makes a click. That click is the chemo getting released into my body. Which makes it impossible to forget that you are hooked up to what is in essence a bag of poison. Poison that will help you, but poison none the less. Click. Click. Click.

I have become hyper aware of my body. I’m trying not to anticipate being sick, but let whatever happens happen. So I’ve spent all day with that feeling I used to get the first 45 minutes after I ate mushrooms. Like “Am I feeling something? Am I nauseous? Do my feet hurt? Am I seeing tracers? I should smoke a bowl, that would fix me.”

On the drug front- my sister told a friend that I had started chemotherapy and this friend just happened to be a cancer survivor. Her advice was to get of bunch of edibles ( that would be snacks with pot in them in you are my mother reading this.) While I think that people should be able to smoke pot all day every day without fear of legal reprisal, getting high while you are sick makes no sense. Sure it might help with any pain, but pot used to make me really paranoid, which I think would be exacerbated by the fact the I was sick.. What would I just be sitting on my couch, stoned out of my mind, like:

I wonder if I have cancer.

(Long pause)

Oh shit, I do.

(Long Pause)

End of play.

The most visible side effect so far are the hiccups. That’s right. Hiccups. Here I was worried about losing my hair and instead I have a fanny pack and the hiccups. A trade I would make seven days a week mind you, but just interesting all the same.

And the tricky thing was that normal hiccup cures don’t work.

“Do you want me to scare you?”

“Um, what’s scarier than canc-"

“Boo”

“It isn’t”

They’d need to find something really horrifying to top cancer. Like soul chilling. Like:

ME: (Hiccup) Wow these things will not go away!

FRIEND: Did you hear that Republicans are trying to pass a health care bill again?

ME: Wow, I’m cured.