entering phase two

ah, yes, the best laid plans do indeed go awry...

the original idea was to write every day here about my experiences, about treatment and cancer and surviving day to day. however, after the first few days it became very clear that doing anything more substantial but sleeping was going to be near-impossible.

the main side effect of interferon treatment is fatigue, and indeed after the first few infusions it began to hit full force. i found myself suddenly sleeping entire days away, sixteen, eighteen hours, unable to keep up energy for anything more than going the half-mile to the cancer center every afternoon where they hooked me up to hydration and interferon and spent a few hours infusing it while i read, slept, tried to write letters to friends. at one point as the neurological effects grew i started a letter to a friend that, when i returned to it several days later, contained more errors in spelling, grammar, and general nonsense than i've made in anything i've written since elementary school. i don't misspell things, but the effects of the therapy began seriously affecting everything from language to memory. there are chunks of time that i don't remember, things i clearly did that i can't recall why or when or how.

there were a certain number of issues that needed to be dealt with, including a very high level of difficulty starting an IV each day that led to the temporary implantation of a PICC line, a longer-lasting IV catheter that was placed 48 cm into a vein in my arm. that simplified the process significantly.

clearly, an interesting four weeks. monday last week was the last infusion, and tuesday i returned to the office, where i have been working at least half-time since. they gave me a week break between the two phases of treatment, and so monday of this week i began eleven months of injecting myself with interferon every monday, wednesday, and friday. the dosage is less than half of what i was given before, but in a highly concentrated form that takes longer to travel through the body because it is injected beneath the skin instead of directly into a vein. i expected it to take a while to kick in, but after i did the first injection it was only a few minutes before i could feel it.

monday was a bad night not just because of the return of pain and fever and headache and other effects, but because we'd learned earlier in the day that the surviving dog from my childhood had become so sick she needed to be put to sleep that night. gramma and i went over to my parents' house to say our goodbyes, and watching this wonderful, beautiful animal that i love going through seizures, pain, and cancer, things i know so intimately now, was extremely difficult. facing annie's death, my own mortality is staring back at me, and seeing her so ill brings back fears of dying a terrible, painful death, with no one coming to the rescue as we can for our animals, relieving their pain when death is inevitable. the nagging question of whether this will be me in four or five years, dying slowly of a terminal illness... it has stuck with me. there has been too much loss, death, cancer, disease in our circle the past year. we've lost three much-loved animals, all to cancer, and in addition to me at least two other people in our extended family/friend circle were diagnosed with breast cancer at almost the same time i was diagnosed with melanoma.

i heard something last night, a quote from stephen hawking, that affected me rather strongly. when he was diagnosed with ALS, and given only a few years to live, he first became depressed, but then it began to seem that the disease wasn't progressing as quickly. he wrote (and this is from memory and not exactly right), "...i dreamed i was to be executed, and realized, there are a lot of worthwhile things to do, if i were to be reprieved." after a rather apathetic life, at about the same age as i am now, hawking realized that there were things he wanted to do and threw himself into them, determined to live as normal a life as possible despite the death sentence that had been delivered. reprieved, he found purpose, purpose that has driven him to fight to live much longer with a terminal illness than anyone expected, and to accomplish truly amazing things in the time he has been given.

there is now this huge question hanging over my life, a question that will determine the rest of its course -- and the choices i make will differ so greatly depending on the answer. if i am to die, there is only the present to do and experience as much as possible; if i am to live, the future is entirely different. i am getting tired of waiting to find the answer to that question.