Journal: News & Comment

Tomorrow is the new Day One

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If there's any shorthand for how serious it is that tomorrow morning I start the full-on chemotherapy, plus radiation, it's this—my doctor has said to me that:

1. I should switch to white bread.
2. I should eat more red meat.

You won't hear your doctor suggesting those, I don't think.

The white bread is to avoid the irritation that large amounts of fibre can cause once my bowels are subjected to the various drugs and high-energy particle beams. The red meat is to help alleviate my anemia, caused by blood I've lost from my tumour (my first alarming symptom, back last fall, was blood in my stool).

Here's the other shorthand:

Some of those drugs I've been taking daily for awhile now (the insulin for 16 years, actually), while others I start tomorrow as part of my chemo regime. The photo doesn't include the two different drugs that will be injected into me intravenously over the course of three hours tomorrow, nor the radiation, nor anything I'm taking to help alleviate pain and discomfort, but which I didn't get from the pharmacy. (Alas, I have to lay off even the tiny drams of scotch, it looks like.)

So yeah, I'm nervous. Not for the procedures tomorrow, which will whiz by through the whole morning before lunchtime, but for what's going to start happening to my body after that. Still, it's better than what my body has been doing to itself for the past year, insidiously behind the scenes.

Look out, cancer, we're comin' to getcha.

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