Every Fart is a Prayer
In the follow up of the devastating news from two weeks ago I have started a new chemotherapy treatment. My old treatment, ABVD infusion, had a litany of side effects that I was fortunate to mostly avoid. This new treatment, escalated BEACOPP, promised that it would be a lot more ruthless.
And like the actual police force, oh boy was it.
This infusion consists of (hopefully only) two 3-week cycles, where each cycle has me in the hospital for the first 4 days as I get pumped with chemicals, the next few days has me popping immunosuppressant pills like candied fruit, and then I get another blast of chemo before my body is allowed to rest for a week and a half before starting the cycle again. I'm on day 6, and my body is barely able to be upright for a few hours before spending an afternoon horizontal and an evening passing as a semi-functional human. My practice with fatigue management during ABVD has mentally prepared me for this, but the accompanying headaches and stomach gurgles are complications that I'm barely staying on top of. I believe Ivy is jealous that there is finally a contender to her title of "Chief Layabout."
Day 6 has been easy though compared to days 2-3 of this cycle. On those days I was stuck in the hospital, and I was dealing with one of the most unfortunate side effects of them all: winter bear syndrome.
Every morning evening at the hospital I was weighed. At first I thought that it was to make sure that I was eating enough food during the day - weight loss due to loss of appetite is a common side effect after all - until I saw that I had ballooned by nearly 3 kilograms since my last weigh-in. That's just water weight from all of the IV tubes and saline drips....right?
In a bit of a digression, the food served to the patients in the Oncology ward is depressing even by German standards. If you don't have a loving family to smuggle in proper food, your breakfast and dinner both consist of a slice of hearty - and untoasted - vollkornbrot with two slices of gouda cheese and a sliced meat unit that tastes like it was rejected from the Schneiders factory. For vitamins you get a yoghurt fruit cup in the mornings, and a whole raw tomato in the evenings. Dessert consists of a sort of custard. If you ask for extra protein you get a hardboiled egg.
Dear reader, the extra weight was not in fact water.
Onkopedia helpfully points out that both constipation and diarrhea are common side effects of this new chemotherapy treatment. While that sounds extremely unhelpful, it turns out that both are in fact possible. I learned this firsthand on days 2 and 3, where my gut felt so full that the mere thought of stuffing more things into my body made me uncomfortable. Every rumbling in my lower body had me running to the bathroom in hopes of release. Every fart was a prayer that my weight would fall like the walls of Jericho.
God didn't answer, but the nurses did.
When my distress became clear, an additional set of fluids was appended to my IV bag rotation. These fluids were not to fight the cancer - they were to fight the side effects. The nurses would hook these up to me, and ask me every few hours if I had felt their effects. Within 24 hours, those effects made themselves known. The farts were no longer prayers - they were now omens.
