I have not posted for several days for a few reasons. It all goes back to chemo on Thursday. There was a guy there who came in for chemo. When he got up from the recliner after chemo he was sick and very out of it. Janice said that is the way she expected me to get up every time I went in. Obviously that is not what happens to me, not once even. I get up, walk out, drive home and go to bed for a nap because all the prep, mostly the Benadryl, makes me sleepy. I sleep and wake up Friday and try to get some things done. No problems whatsoever except for the yellow-green skin thing I bitch about. My appetite is great, I have fairly normal bodily functions and enough energy to do things around the house.

Then there is this time. It went sideways when I told the oncologist that I was taking Unisom for sleeping, a little tiny bit of it. He got kind of twisted and recommended that I take Ambien. They also tested my blood, like they always do prior to chemo. My red and white blood cell counts came back off the bottom end of the charts. Everything else looked okay. But the nurse said I should avoid fresh salads and vegetables, eat steamed or well cooked foods and so on to avoid food borne infections because my resistance was low.

Now, back to the Ambien. I have a loose association problem with Ambien. Carlos Mencia did a skit on it, he stretched the side effects to include sleep bull riding and a few other comic events. It affected my opinion of Ambien very badly. Well, I filled the prescription. The crap comes with a full page of side effect warnings to read. I took the pill and waited and nothing happened. After an hour, I went to bed. Bad night, not sleeping, crappy dreams, felt like crap Friday morning. Along with a weird sort of feeling that wasn't normal. And tired because I hadn't slept well. So Friday night, ever hopeful, I followed the instructions exactly. I took the pill, went to bed and tried to sleep. I had nightmares so ghastly I will not recall any of them here. Luckily I was able to stay 'outside' of the bad dreams and not get swept into the madness. I watched them for about two hours and they just got worse. Finally I got up, wide awake, and spent some time surfing the web before I tried to sleep again. Same thing happened, bad nightmares and no productive sleep. By Saturday morning I was tired, spacey, slightly dingy, and thoroughly finished with Ambien. I would describe how I felt as on the verge of hallucinations. All day long I felt very off, barely able to deal with life. Ambien was a total disaster for me, I only want to know how to dispose of the rest of the prescription so nobody else will have the nights like I had. I went back to Unisom, good night sleep Saturday night on about a sixth of a tablet.

Saturday though Janice was all on edge, tears every few minutes, withdrawn, just a mess. I tried to talk to her. It didn't go well. No matter what I said I could not comfort her. I told her to back down from trying to control my every move, she couldn't live my life for me, that taking care of a cancer patient is not something that a loved one or close relative should do and so on. No effect. About an hour later she tells me she is reading this story in some magazine about some woman who has pancreatic cancer and the trials this woman had/has are nightmares compared to my episode. I won't go into particulars, but I have the easiest pancreatic cancer in the world to deal with compared to this woman. So, my wife is all seriously depressed over some story some woman wrote about her struggle with pancreatic cancer and it is making my day and my life a miserable hell and making my wife's day even worse. I hope the stupid ass who decided this was a story people need to read gets her just desserts in hell. Some stories just don't need to be told. Especially one that sends my wife and caretaker into the pits of depression like that. And of course I need to caution my wife that reading other stories and transposing that setting to me is a major Bozo No-No, and don't do that again.

Besides the Ambien episode and the crazy ass scary story about some woman who had hell with pancreatic cancer, Janice has now gone way off the deep end about the possibility of all sorts of sources of infection that might plague me because of the low red and white cell counts. She is way off the scale, nuts is not even close to describing it. I can't eat this, she is researching the threats from that set of sources, she panics every time I open my mouth because a fly might go down my throat and kill me with hoof and mouth disease. She is hovering over me like I am a seven month old baby with thirteen diseases that were wiped out in the 19th century like typhus and typhoid and green eyed chancre cholera and monkey borne spastic left eye twitch and in general making me feel entirely uncomfortable. The worst part is she is trying to force me to use that silly hand sanitizer crap she carries with her to wash my hands every time I touch food. I wanted to get good and sick and throw up a stream of mutant green slime across the room so she would get some sort of validation for all her efforts at worrying. Instead I went in and took a nap. All healthy when I went to sleep and got up healthy and the worst I ever got was a dry throat from sleeping too little because of the Ambien. I should send the rest of that Ambien prescription to the doofus bitch that printed that story and pay her back for the suffering she caused in my house.

But all in all, I have it pretty easy as a pancreatic cancer patient. I have never had vomiting, or even gotten really sick. They caught the cancer in time and except for the time when they had to hustle to put the stent in, I am fairly well off and even well comparatively. I have put on weight, I have even started growing my hair back while I am still in chemo. I am in general such a healthy case of pancreatic cancer that my primary care physician practically brags about me. I have it so good and so easy, most of my problems are external to my illness, they are peripheral to the medical issues I really have. And that concerns me because when I started this blog and I got all self involved about how tough it was and how sick I was. I'm really not that sick nor am I close to dying anymore. Mostly my big complaints are about how much of my energy is being sapped by the treatment and the disease. I hate losing so much of my life. But in a while it will be over and I will slowly get back to my normal way of life, that is all I have to complain about. So I will change the tone in my blog to reflect how well I really have been, and that I am on the recovery side of it all. There will still be pissy days when I really feel down because of either the chemo or just plain being worn out, but by and large when you read about my whining, know that it is temporary and I will feel stupid for having written very shortly after I post it. But I'll leave it up because it was true when I wrote it. I will have to contravene it later. That is how this is supposed to work.

So, I had a crappy few days because of some prescription medicines, a stupid pity party story about cancer that my wife read in a magazine and the slight possibility of food borne infections. Besides that I had four beers and a great steak that my neighbor cooked for me yesterday. I am eating way too much (because I can because I have an appetite) and I am too lazy and a bit too self involved. Tomorrow I intend to eat less, pay more attention to the people around me and thank my lucky stars that I have such an easy time of pancreatic cancer.