A Time and a Place

I’m not writing this post for sympathy. And no, nothing major happened. Just a minor annoyance. Just a reminder of how important it is to always be aware of my surroundings.

I had treatment in Atlanta on Wednesday. Had a good meeting with my doctor. I’ve been feeling nauseous for the past three weeks, and he seems to think it’s from all the medicine I’ve been taking. That’s what I was hoping he was going to say. Better than some of things my little brain was coming up with. Trust me.

He also thinks the nerve pressure and my blurriness of vision is a reaction to the radiation. Doesn’t make it feel any better, but I was convinced he was going to hear blurriness of vision and just pat me on my head and send me on my way. That wasn’t the case at all. Either way, I’ve got scans next week. If anything else is going on we will find out then.

After the meeting I grabbed a sandwich from the snack bar and then headed downstairs. The internet service has been HORRIBLE in the infusion center for the past few months. I thought I had it solved last time I was there but apparently, I had not. To make matters worse, the guy who usually fixes it wasn’t there. Add that to the fact that Jaimie wasn’t able to come with me because of the new Covid rules. That meant I was going to have no distractions for the next couple of hours.

Just me and my thoughts.

Which I don’t mind, for say, an hour. But I was facing three of them.

They called my name and brought me to the back. The nurse asked if I wanted a warm blanket. I told her that I did, and for the rest of the walk she talked to me about how much she missed sports.

Since I am on a clinical trial, where I get my treatment is all the way in the back. Not sure why they want to keep us separate. I put that on the list of things to obsess about for the next three hours. I do like the fact that it’s usually empty. Like yesterday, I had the whole row to myself. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. It was like I landed an empty row on a cross country flight.

The day went fine. I worked on my blog, the pharmacy didn’t take all day to make my medicine. Then, with about forty-five minutes left in my day, things broke bad. Well not bad. That’s when things became mildly annoying.

Here’s what happened. This guy walked back to where I was sitting and starting talking to my nurse. By this point an older African-American woman had joined my row and this dude was standing right in front of her.

He was there to share some good news. He was there to share that he was in complete and full remission. Such are a remission, apparently, that his doctors were almost positive it was going to be gone forever. “It was the longest year of my life,” he said, ten feet from me, in the middle of my fourth.

This is not meant to be negative. Please don’t leave, “Sorry this happened to you,” comments. Nothing happened to me. And I don’t want this to sound like I am upset or jealous that this person is in remission. Fine, maybe a little bit jealous, but that’s not the point.

And I know that nurses love good news. I know they want to hear that a person they treated is better and that their work is not in vain, all I’m saying is that there might be a better place to have those conversations than five feet away from people hooked up to bags of experimental cancer treatment!

I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths. On the bright side, there was one less person dealing with this. And I had the topic of my next blog. Thirty minutes I was done with my bag and I was on my way.