Friday, May 25, 2012

No Going Back

Today is a strange day, one of those weatherless, skyless days. I’ve reached exhaustion and am looking forward to a blood transfusion on Tuesday with chemo which will make for a long day, but I’m just spent so it will be worth it. My whole self is so depleted, I’m having trouble speaking, the words don’t come out right and it’s frustrating, stammering, halting.

When I play Scramble, I see a word and then trace it in backwards, over and over until I realize what I’m doing. My scores are plummeting while G’s are going up, he’s slaughtering me.

I have salt and pepper hair. When it fell out {the first time}, the dark hairs were tenatious and a few clumps of them remained all through chemo, shaved off, of course, but you could see the stubble. As my hair grew in, my face was ringed with dark hair, the other day I noticed it was gone, I thought it was just my imagination perhaps, but next day sitting with a friend she asked “where did your dark hair go?” Later that night I realized that it had fallen out, no big clumps this time, just a trail of a thousand eyelashes. I can’t pull it out in breezy tufts like when it was long, but if I pull some out between my finger tips, it’s mostly the dark coming out. So the first chemo killed my white haired cancer cells and this one is after the dark haired cancer cells. It’s odd. Everything feels odd these days. I look like an old man with a receeding hairline, I’ll probably shave it off again in a few days when it gets sparser, which seems redundant. Been there done that, I’ve been loving my soft new hair and now I’ve got to start from scratch and worry about scalp burn when I go outside. It’s been seven months now since this odyssey began. A lot has happened, I’ve gone from warrior to dishrag, optimism and energy waning. Maybe it’s the fatigue, the relentless treadmill of treatment and testing. It’s hard to recall my previous life and I’m only starting to realize there’s no going back.

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