That's What She Said

 My previous post was very cathartic. I got to tell the story of how I genuinely felt like I was dying.  I’ve recently heard that the average survival for neuroendocrine prostate cancer is about a year, and based on the anecdotal stories I’ve heard, that might be a bit generous.  December was a very difficult month.  My body was telling me something was direly wrong, and I know how serious my diagnosis is.  I wrote about it and got all my worries and fears out of my system for now.

Today I’m feeling much better.  It’s the final day of my second cycle of folfiri chemotherapy.  Just like the previous cycle, on the final day I started feeling a lot better.  When I listen to my body, it’s not telling me tales of impending doom.  I feel almost normal.  Better yet, it’s been about a year since my most dire cancer diagnosis, so I’ve beaten the odds and a bit of celebration is in order.

Today my wife and I took a trip to our Vermont hideaway.  Rather than just tell the story, I thought I’d do something different and make a short video showing me shovelling the path to the side door.  I can say I’m feeling good, but a video of me chucking snow would be much more convincing.  It turned out that video captured a moment that I found to be exceptionally funny.

But before getting to Vermont and the video, a short detour.  The flip side of feeling good on the final day of the chemo cycle is that tomorrow is infusion day, and I know what’s in store for me in the coming week.  In about 18 hours after I write this, I’ll be hooked to not just one, but two IV pumps feeding drugs from two IV bags into my chemo port.

After 90 minutes of that, I’ll get the third drug of the folfiri cocktail.  This consists of an initial dose pushed into my port via a syringe, then a portable pump is hooked up that will deliver the rest of the dose over the next 46 hours.  Here’s a photo from last cycle, topless so you can see the pump and the tubing leading to my chest port.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments on my topless photos in the past.  Not all positive, but like publicity, any comments are good comments.

After the pump is removed on Wednesday, I typically sleep most of the day on Thursday and Friday, then start feeling a bit better around Saturday.

In my previous post I spoke of the challenge of learning to live within my reduced ability to do things. In theory doing less each day would mean I’d have more days where I could at least do something. There's two problems with that approach.

Firstly, some tasks can't be made smaller. For example, driving myself to a follow-up appointment. It's a couple hours in the car plus about an hour of getting my blood tested and meeting with the nurse practitioner. My wife could drive me, but it doesn't appear that driving is the issue. It's the two hours in the car getting my insides jostled about that's the problem.

And so, I fell into a pattern of doing something meaningful every other day, then resting on the day in between. That was until Friday.

Friday I went for a 1.0 mile walk. Saturday, as expected, I felt tired and sore as a result, but instead of resting I took a variety pack of pain medicine and went out for a 1.2 mile walk.  In theory I should have been a complete basket case today, Sunday.  But I wasn’t, which is the second problem with trying to do less.  Some days I can do much, much more than I can do on other days.

I didn't go for a walk today. Instead my wife and I took a trip to our Vermont hideaway. While it rained in southern New England, the foothills of the Green Mountains got 6-12 inches of snow.  While we have hired someone to plow the driveway, we still shovel the walkways and the deck ourselves. You might think we bought the place because of our love of shoveling snow, and I'm not sure I could argue against that successfully.

I will say that one of the things that routinely makes me sad is when I realize I spend more time in my oncologist's office than in Vermont. It's an unfortunate confluence of chemo side effects, appointments, the weather, and caring for a diabetic cat. We had a lovely multi-day visit in November, and it really bugs me that I haven't been able to repeat that yet.

But here we are now. I wrote the first draft of this by the warmth of the wood stove before we headed back to our other home. Even though I didn't walk today, I did help with the shoveling, and as mentioned earlier had my wife shoot a short video to prove it.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to hear what I’m saying, but it should be pretty obvious that my shovelling was interrupted by a tree branch buried in the snow that was too large for me to lift and toss aside.  To me, this was very symbolic of how difficult it is to get wood up when you no longer have testosterone due to cancer treatment.  With such analogies in my head, I found my wife’s comment about the size of the branch to be intensely funny, and if you couldn’t hear it my response was “that’s what she said”.

It was an incredibly juvenile joke, but to me it was the funniest use of that sentence in my entire life.  It had several layers of humor in this context.  Firstly, my wife sounded genuinely surprised at the size of this long, hard branch.  Secondly, “that’s what she said” is actually a statement of fact.  I’ve been laughing about it all afternoon.  I’m not sure if it’s really that funny, but it’s certainly been more fun laughing than crying.

After that unexpected bit of hilarity, my wife took a video of me clearing the branch with a chainsaw.

When I watched this afterwards, my first thought was my victory pose at the end would have been mind-boggling dangerous if the saw was still running.  I want my audience to know that I stopped the Stihl (conveniently pronounced “steal”) after the last cut, so there was no significant danger in my celebration.

I did all that activity without any meaningful pain on only my base level of pain medication (no additional pills taken for “breakthrough” pain).  Yippee!  As a footnote, this is strenuous enough to get the endorphins flowing which are the body's natural opioid painkillers.  It's why being active is so good at fighting pain and fatigue and also helps lift your mood.  When I can’t be active, I’m usually downright miserable.

The next week will be difficult, as usual, but in the long run it should allow me to spend more quality time in Vermont shoveling, cutting up trees, walking, perhaps even running, and occasionally pausing to admire the scenery.  I’ve bounced back from treatment before, I can do it again.