Day 106, Sunday, May 12th, 2013

As I write, I am attached to, Jake, my take-home pump. He is tiny, and kind of adorable. Jake is currently pumping Tacrolimus (aka FK-506, or fujimycin) into me. Tacrolimus is a macrolide immunosuppressant, is actually produced by a soil bacterium, and is generally given only to patients who have undergone an allogeneic stem-cell transplant, aka moi, me, myself, and I. Things like this are administered to prevent my body from attacking Shiny's Sparkles (dad's stem cells, if you'll recall) and to prevent his sparkles from attacking me during the early stages of recovery after said transplant. It makes you feel really warm in your everything, and that feeling tends to linger right in the throat for several hours which I find somewhat unpleasant. Aside from that, it doesn't seem to have any other immediately tangible or lingering side effects, which I do find pleasant.

So that's what I'm up to right now.

The last couple of days have been, uh, well, crap-tastic.

I woke up on Friday full of what is likely best described as piss and vinegar, but then I went to the bathroom, resulting in much less of the former. Kelly, who has since flown home to Canadiana, accompanied me to what was, theoretically speaking, my last session of chemotherapy ever. That aspect of the experience is not to be lumped in with the crap-tastic aspects. That aspect is potentially friggin' amazing. No, the crap-tastic aspects focus mostly on the effects of the chemo, with a touch of crap that happened afterwards.

Friday, I arrived at the clinic at seven-thirty am for blood draw, after which I reported to Infusion, which is on the fifth floor of the SCCA. When you report in at infusion, they have adopted the buzzer system often seen at restaurants that typically have long wait times, which, I'm sure, results in the receptionists hearing the joke, "our table is ready" about a thousand times a day. Hell, I've made it at least twice, to different receptionists, and while I'm clever, that joke is not. That there is dad humour (not my dad, specifically, although it is certainly part of his stock in trade, but dad jokes in general).

I received a pretty decent dose of Cytoxan, which meant that I had to be there for a little over twelve hours. The actual chemo itself only takes an hour, but because of potential bladder damage from the drug, they first pump you full of fluids until you have excreted a minimum of five hundred and fifty millilitres of urine, which they know because you pee into a gradiated jug, which you keep at your bedside. Oh don't be gross, the jug has a lid. Come on.

Once you've achieved pee-minus five-fifty, they start your chemo dose, and then it's bye-bye-brain-cells. Woosh. Cytoxan is particularly bad for making you feel physically unhappy afterwards, and it lingers. Saturday was no picnic, in large part because I woke up at four in the morning with every last bit of anti-nauseant passed out of my system, and I broke my no-barf streak several times. I hate throwing up; I think it is my least favourite physical experience, and I say this having had broken bones, the unspeakable butt-pain from the first transplant, really large needles jabbed into me while fully conscious, and once having sneezed, hiccupped, and burped all at once (novel, but not recommended). I'm sure that migraine sufferers would have a different answer, but for me, barfing is the worst.

Saturday was compounded by several things: my having to report to the SCCA at eight am that morning for bloodwork (the day after chemo, who does that); my requiring IV anti-nauseants before we could begin the infusion that I was actually there for (which also prevented me from taking my scheduled medication that morning, which was not, as they say, good), my first infusion of Tacrolimus, which I mostly slept through, honestly; and the fact that I woke up to a conversation between my mother and my nurse about what to do about the bed bug that Mom had killed that morning.

That's right. Bed bugs.

Now, frankly, whether or not  an actual bed bug was killed, and whether or not the bite-looking spots Mom evidenced were in fact bites, is somewhat up in the air. The net result, however, was that we went through official channels, because for neutropenic patients, this is potentially a big deal. Of course, bed bugs don't usually carry anything, but that's not the point. So. We are staying in a different room at the SCCA house, and currently, Mom and Dad are upstairs to meet with the pest control people, and we'll see what's what.

Given the diverse clientele and high turnover rate at the SCCA House, one would expect this to come up periodically, honestly, like at any hotel. It's absolutely no reflection of our cleanliness, Mom keeps a neater house than just about anyone I have ever seen, bordering on what might actually be called anal about cleanliness. Bordering, maybe, but clean. The important thing is that the situation is being handled with decisive alacrity.

From the above, hence the crap-tacular moniker I've attached to the last couple of days.

I woke up incredibly chipper today, but damn, son, Friday-Saturday were junk. Kelly flew home on Saturday, and had to put her luggage in quarantine when she got home, pending the results of today's investigations. How much does that suck? A lot, that is how much.

BIG ASSED UPDATE: NO BED BUGS. FALSE ALARM. 

"Why did Sally fall off the swing?"

"I don't know."

"She had no arms. Knock Knock."

"Who's there?"

"Not Sally."