The Hospital (Part I)

Wow. What a wild and crazy week it turned out to be.

I have to admit, I sort of thought I had this whole cancer thing down after my first round of chemo. I thought I knew what to expect around every corner. I even started planning things a month or two away because, surely, undergoing chemo would be a very predictable experience.

Okay, days 1-3 I can be productive because I’ll be on the chemo steroid. Days 4-6 should be something a little more mellow cause I’ll be coming down from the steroid. Days 7-14 I’ll have some mouth sores, so maybe nothing that centers around food. And days 15-21 I’ll be fit as a fiddle and can jam-pack my calendar with every single thing that I need to be at my best for. That’ll work out perfectly.

How uncharacteristically optimistic I was being (though the desire for control was very on brand). I had the bravado of an army vet who had been to Nam and seen the worst of it. But my plane hadn’t even landed in Hanoi yet. What an idiot I was. Turns out, cancer isn’t the compassionate and accommodating disease I thought it was. Sometimes it likes to chuck a few curveballs.

So, what happened?

On Tuesday evening, I started to develop mouth sores. But that was no problemo. I went through all this the last time—I checked my symptom tracker. Everything was right on schedule. Unfortunately, I also started to develop horrible throat pain in tandem with the mouth sores. And that was new.

But hey. It was nothing a brave soldier like me couldn’t take on, right?

Wrong. By nightfall, the pain had become so excruciating that I could barely swallow my own saliva. It felt like I was swallowing glass. I’m not a pain pill person. I even skip Tylenol for headaches if the bottle isn’t in a convenient location (aka right next to me on the nightstand). But in this case, I marched all the way downstairs and took the unopened bottle of hydrocodone I got after my C-section and popped one. I did it without shame or fear of the possibility of addiction that lurked around the corner. I took it with the confidence of a seasoned pill-popper who carted bottles around in her purse.

Heck, if it was an option, I would have let Jordan shoot me with an elephant tranquilizer.

Come morning, I had barely slept. The pain pill helped me go down for one-hour increments before being jolted awake by the pain of swallowing my own spit. But hey, no one said chemo would be easy, am I right? Surely this was just a bad case of the mouth sores. Toughen up, Riney.

I would toughen up, but I would also call the oncology office the very moment they opened and see if they had any thoughts on the matter. Their thoughts were that I should come in at 12:30pm to be seen by a doctor. And I thought that sounded like a pretty good idea.

It was 9am and the appointment was at noon… it was the longest three hours of my life. The pain kept getting worse and worse. I resorted to spitting into a cup in order to avoid swallowing my spit. It just hurt too much, and I couldn’t take it. Our poor nanny-extraordinaire had to helplessly listen to the symphony of wounded animal sounds coming from my bedroom—from low and guttural like a cow, to high-pitched and whiney like a dog.

Finally, it was time to head to the cancer clinic and hopefully get this all sorted out. Surely, they’d have some sort of specialty mouth rinse that would make this all go away. An oral solution to this nightmare. I was sure it was just your run-of-the-mill mouth sore situation. But Judging by the doctor’s face as she watched me spit into my empty Starbucks cup and grimace in severe pain when some of that pesky saliva found a way down my trachea… it was clear this wasn’t so rudimentary after all.

The doctor at the cancer clinic was very kind. Although she did tell me to calm down a couple times when I was writhing in pain. I don’t like that on a normal day, let alone when I haven’t really eaten or slept for 24 hours because my saliva keeps morphing into tiny razor blades. I wanted to take one of the metaphorical razors and chuck it at her.

She and her nurse tried to keep my pain at bay. They shot me up with a couple doses of Dilaudid through my chemo port. It didn’t totally take the pain away, but it certainly made me care less about it. They also hooked me up to some fluids and I was able to sleep for a little bit. When I woke, I was shaky, cold, and delirious. Maybe from the pain meds? Like I said, I’m not a big pain meds gal, so, I wasn’t sure what to think. I just knew I couldn’t think much at all.  

The nurse loaded me up with some Oxy to take home (doctors really love shoving opioids at you) and told us we could go home. “Let us know if you get a fever over 100 degrees.” “Will do,” I said with a mental salute.  

We drove home. I kept passing out in the car, I felt so out of it. The second we got home I climbed into bed. Finally, I was comfortable and didn’t have to move for a while. But then, I noticed the thermometer placed exactly where I like my Tylenol—at arm’s length. So, I took it and popped it under my tongue.

103.3 degrees.

Back into the car we went. This time to the emergency room. Jordan dropped me off because he had to go pick up Winston (yes, we’re still juggling two children through all this). So the once brave, now half-conscious soldier went in alone. My cancer beanie was barely clinging to my head as if it, too, was tired from this very long day. My once-chic-now-unmistakably-cancerous hairdo was exposed.

I explained my situation to the check-in guy as best I could, still clutching my Starbucks spit cup. He admitted me immediately. I thought babies were the Fast Passes of hospitals. Nope. Turns out, cancer beats babies. So, I swaggered over to an exam room, locking eyes with a couple people who had been waiting there far longer than I had. That’s right, bitches, I have cancer… Sucks to be you! As the nurse sat me down and started taking my vitals, I was thinking I’d be out of there in no time… There was that naive bravado again.

Turns out, it would take two nights in the hospital and near-sepsis before I’d be coming home.

TO BE CONTINUED…