There’s a lot of misinformation about the treatment of cancer, what to expect, and the aftermath.  Much of it is from movies, television, and those “feel good” charity commercials.  They all want you to believe we’re in this fight together and that a support system will magically appear around you when the shit hits the fan.  I wish that had been the case.

Let’s be honest, there’s no Dr. Wilson from House M.D. coming to shower you with infinite compassion and a crack team of doctors.  What you get is a brutally efficient system of treatment that, in my case, happened so quickly I didn’t even have time to understand what I was undergoing.  Diagnosed on a Monday, surgery the next week, and my 1st chemo the very next day.  You may remember how well that turned out, with a severe reaction to Rituxan and a single nurse keeping her cool while half a dozen others stared at me as I convulsed.  Good times.

Some people were nice, but many were either ignorant of the process or indifferent to it, sometimes cruelly so.  I still vividly remember the nurse who tugged on my power port like it was bolted to my chest with rivets instead of just skin.  The way she jammed a syringe of morphine so quickly into my port, in spite of my protests, that I almost threw up on her shoes.  No blissful euphoria there only a terrible twisting of my stomach and dizzying bout of nausea.  Pumped full of painkillers I still couldn’t sleep as she stomped in and out of my room on her hourly checks, ignoring the fact that me and my wife (cramped in a chair next to me) were trying to get some meager semblance of sleep.  These were just a few lovely moments from the ordeal of my treatment.

[click to continue…]

{ 7 comments }