Holding Unsteady

Now that's a headache.

Chemo round #3 took place this past Monday and true to form, it took about a day and half for the meds to catch up to Karen and play the knockout game with her. She's been in bed pretty much nonstop since early Tuesday evening. She's terrifically nauseated, her body aches, and she has a constant, brutal headache. Pain meds and more weed than your typical Phish concert have failed to make any kind of a dent in her, well, misery. We're hoping that the side effects will ease up after a few days but, to be honest, we are not terribly optimistic about that. The pattern--albeit over a relatively brief time period--has been that recovering from chemo gets about a week harder/longer each time. At least we'll have an idea if all this terribleness is worth the trouble in a few weeks: we've gotten her follow-up PET scan and MRI scheduled for the week of the 17th. We are both looking forward to and dreading the tests.

In other news, our home is not so much a Lifetime movie heartwarming story of quiet triumph starring Meredith Baxter Birney these days. As Miranda succinctly put it the other night, "It's so sad here. Everyone is sad all the time." And that's pretty much true. While we're not all glooming around with a personal storm cloud bobbing over our heads, there is a palpable oppressiveness that sucks the air out of the house more often than not. We try to be positive, we try to enjoy the time we have. We want to be the good cancer family. But it's beyond hard when one of us is essentially bedridden and not making any sort of noticeable gains. We've all lost our temper, lost patience with one another at least once. Except for Karen although I'd like to think now and again that she'd like to tear through us like a bulldozer with rabies just once if she could muster the energy.

I won't speak for the other denizens of the ward, but I will confess that even though these upsets are actually very rare I grapple with intense shame over it. I think we want to pull together but sometimes our nerves are so raw that we cannot bear to be touched, physically or metaphorically. And definitely not by Woody Allen. Ick.

And just so we don't end on that terribly downbeat note.....we are very excited that one Mr. Neal Rosen, my college/post-college roommate, will be dropping by for a visit starting this Friday. We intend to show him the entire Spoils of Babylon mini-series because it is comedy genius and I heartily besqueech you all to watch it.