I made it through the first week.<\/p>\n
I’m tired, and feverish, and really irritable.\u00c2\u00a0 My Parents are trying to figure out what I want, and how to help me, and how to make me happier, but I just want to be left alone.\u00c2\u00a0 I tell them that, but they aren’t listening.<\/p>\n
Of course, I could not make it through this without them.\u00c2\u00a0 At all.\u00c2\u00a0 But I also wish I had some more distance.\u00c2\u00a0 I need to process this stuff in my head, and I need quiet and alone time.\u00c2\u00a0 And my mom is being Jewish-mother on me.\u00c2\u00a0 Super well intentioned, but won’t leave me alone sometimes.<\/p>\n
I went through a big debate about whether to come home.\u00c2\u00a0 I grew up here, but I don’t live in Portland, I live in Brooklyn.\u00c2\u00a0 But Brooklyn is loud, and my hospital (Columbia Presbyterian) is all the way at the north end of Manhattan.\u00c2\u00a0 And my aparment is tiny.\u00c2\u00a0 And it is so hot in the summer.\u00c2\u00a0 As I put it in an email:<\/p>\n
April 29, 2008<\/p>\n
i start the interferon drug treatment roughly June 1st.\u00c2\u00a0 i’m trying to decide whether i should stay in nyc for this, or go back to portland.\u00c2\u00a0 i get a high dose IV for 1 month, followed by 11 months of self administered low dose.\u00c2\u00a0 toxicity is high, and hits hardest in the first two weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 not sure whether it would be better to be around friends, my brother, and my mom (who would come out), though with a harder time of getting to the hospital, or to be with my parents, their dogs, and one or two friends in portland, though with easier access to the hospital.\u00c2\u00a0 i also feel like being able to go into the studio if only for a few hours, a few days a week, will have grounding effect on me -\u00c2\u00a0 its because of the people in the lab more than the actual working (i can do that from home, or from portland.) also the airplane flight will be hard, and is not recommended post-surgery b\/c of swelling issues.\u00c2\u00a0 i’m honestly torn, and unsure.\u00c2\u00a0 though i have some time to figure that out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But I decided to go home:<\/p>\n
May 24th, 2008<\/p>\n
i made the decision to go to PDX to have the Interferon.\u00c2\u00a0 the range of reactions to the drug vary from 4 weeks of 103 degree fever, to a bad fever for the first two weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 it is hard to not know which will happen, but i would rather be in PDX feeling better than I thought, than alone here in NYC with a 103 degree fever for four weeks. and if i do have 4 weeks of high fever, i would def rather be surrounded by quiet, trees, dogs and parents.<\/p>\n
the dr in PDX is going to accept my insurance’s out of network pay rate.\u00c2\u00a0 i have substantial out of network deductible, which sucks,\u00c2\u00a0 but after that, they’ll clear it all fine. it is worth it to be in portland, i think.<\/p>\n
My trip to PDX was delayed because the incision is healing slower than expected.\u00c2\u00a0 It is quite long, and they had to go quite deep, and it is right at the crease of my leg, so it is agitated every time i move my hip joint.\u00c2\u00a0 fun…<\/p>\n
i have a plane ticket leaving June 9th, returning July 19th.\u00c2\u00a0 my first appointment is june 11th.\u00c2\u00a0 that is a wednesday.\u00c2\u00a0 i don’t think i will be getting the Interferon that day.\u00c2\u00a0 i might start later that week, or i may start that monday.\u00c2\u00a0 not sure, and prob wont know until i have that first meeting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I guess it has been so long since I have spent more than a week with them that I underestimated the parental factor.\u00c2\u00a0 I did have some terms (in the next post), but I forgot how my parents can be. It reminds me of when I went on a trip with my father to visit colleges in New England.\u00c2\u00a0 After every campus tour, or class visit he would ask me what I thought.\u00c2\u00a0 And I would say something like “I don’t know,” which really meant “I don’t know yet because I’m still thinking about it.”\u00c2\u00a0 But I hadn’t learned that about myself yet.\u00c2\u00a0 But he kept asking.\u00c2\u00a0 And at some point I cracked and I think I yelled at him, and then didn’t say anything for 24hrs, or something.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe he got the point, but i doubt it: its not like I was the best communicator then.\u00c2\u00a0 I think he was pretty pissed too: flying me across the country and driving me around, and I wouldn’t even tell him what I thought of these things?\u00c2\u00a0 The problem was *I* didn’t know what I thought of them.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to process.\u00c2\u00a0 I needed time to understand my experience.\u00c2\u00a0 Same here, kinda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I made it through the first week. I’m tired, and feverish, and really irritable.\u00c2\u00a0 My Parents are trying to figure out what I want, and how to help me, and how to make me happier, but I just want to be left alone.\u00c2\u00a0 I tell them that, but they aren’t listening. Of course, I could … Continue reading Chemo day 5, end of week 1<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[31,10,32,27,11,33,30,13],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-backstory","category-daily-update","tag-brooklyn","tag-chemo","tag-decisions","tag-friends","tag-interferon","tag-parents","tag-portland","tag-side-effects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}