I SLEPT FOR FIVE UNINTERRUPTED HOURS.
This is the first rest I feel like I have had since I thought I got chemo brain damage last Thursday. I am awake super early, but instead of feeling like I am being dragged by my own consciousness from one low-grade torture to another like a TROMA cut-rate Cenobite, I might be halfway human this morning!
Things could have been worse. So much worse, but days and days of nausea and anti-nausea drugs without sleep wear on a person in ways I had never thought about. I journal and scribble constantly but there’s still a lot of blur in the past week. Little snippets of weird memories in a pain/mad haze. At one point I apparently fell asleep in a mild backbend over a pile of pillows and blankets, mouth open and lolling like a corpse. I remember being super concerned about specific types of crackers in the middle of the night, but I don’t know specifically what was wrong with some types versus others. I also got into some sort of conversation about party tattoos with a nurse? Mostly I was just miserable and exhausted. Never slept more than about 3 hours max, and not solid.
I didn’t get the smorgasbord of side-effects like last time. It has primarily been nausea and fatigue, and the nausea has been the worst by a long shot. I will say that the vaunted diarrhea didn’t/hasn’t occurred yet but I did poop what I am sure is a full-size industrial dock piling one day, and the other was something from a 1990s Tool video. Kinda opposite of warnings.
The last two days have been weirder than the 5 before because the nausea mostly passed but it takes a few days for the drugs to clear out.
Fun thing about drugs that affect my brain chemistry? Migraines as they wear off! The other main trigger for me? Sleep deprivation!
Wednesday morning I was blind for most of the morning due to ocular migraines, and that was combined with a confusion and forgetfulness that would have worried me if I had been able to remember to worry about it. It was a long slow day focused on specific problems one at a time, and I felt really good about what I accomplished (dishes, dual-band radio spectrum AI bullshit at work, petting Louise without getting bit). A bunch of amazing human beings came out of the woodwork, uncoordinated with each other, and just kept hitting me with love and jokes and kindness. You all keep doing that and it keeps overwhelming me with love. I am working to deserve that.
Yesterday was really rough. My head hurt bad enough to necessitate a call to the Triage line early in the morning. I didn’t lose the ability to speak or anything, but the pain was out of this world. If I didn’t already have some experience with migraine I might have panicked. Ellie is a badass as always, and got me sorted with the professionals on the phone before she went off to the Book Mines. That and some spinach and a Daily Bird delivery from CSPAN (momming to the max) turned me from a whithered husk trapped by wind against a barbed wire fence of pain, into a basic sort of primate.
Hyrdate, eat, rest, move. Over and over. By 4pm I came out of my personal directors cut of Ttampocalypse Now enough that I managed a 3 mile walk to the mailbox. In retrospect I may have pushed that too far, but it turned out OK in the end.
This is all really rambling. My days are wildly boring. The main thing is I GOT FIVE HOURS OF SLEEP!!! The other main thing is I LOVE YOU ALL!!!