Nurses Nurses Everywhere

I slept through much of the infusion yesterday. The benadryl made me sleepy, sleepy... I napped away much of the afternoon at home, as well.

At night I couldn't sleep. I tossed and turned until the wee hours. It must have been 3:00 or 4:00 AM before I finally fell asleep. I'm still going to work, though. It's a particularly busy time of year and I don't want to fall too far behind. It's good for my head to go to work. I don't want it to become a burden.

I didn't even see Unsolicited Advice Nurse. I had Frog Nurse. She collects frogs, and her scrubs often are covered with frogs. She has frog pins on her ID. She's a jovially efficient nurses, and I have no problems with her.

I also had a visit from Berkeley Nurse. She also works at the Comprehensive Cancer Center, and she's big on empowering patients to seek complimentary therapies. She stuck her head in to talk to me about supplements to stave off neuropathy (which I believe I'm already developing .... not a good sign).

I also saw the nurse who I most liked from the Infusion Suite. She's back from maternity leave with pictures of a beautiful shining smiling baby who she says wakes up laughing. She was obviously sad that I'd moved on to chemotherapy. It definitely showed in her voice and demeanor. She hugged me twice, and admired my port. More times than anyone she had struggled to find a vein for infusions. For some reason it didn't bother me as much when she did it, though.

Finally, though -- the icing on the nurse cake -- there's Crazy Nurse. At work on Monday, Crazy nurse talked to me about illness. I need to go get ready for work, so I'll make this brief. CN had this to say:

1. My hair is looking thin.
2. The hardest part for her would be not knowing exactly when she would die. She didn't think she would be able to do that.
3. Have the doctors told me how long I have exactly?
4. Did I have any idea, a gut feeling, about how long I have to live?
5. I couldn't just die, just like that, and leave them (work).
6. Oh, also, or leave Eric.
7. How did I feel about leaving Eric?
8. Liver mets are very, very, bad.
9. The way I feel about the disease can change the course of the disease. Was I going to fight it?
10. Have I started the stages yet? Grief, anger, acceptance....?

She stood very close to , withing two feet of me, as I sat. The above is a monolgue that took her about 30 minutes.

It made me laugh.

Here's what I said to her:

I don't think that it's linear progression through stages. I don't like to talk about cancer very much because it's not where I choose to focus my attention. I don't believe that the cancer cells are going to respond to my thoughts. There are millions of biochemical interactions in our body every moment. Our thoughts have some effect on a few of them. Thoughts aren't going to save my life.

There are certain statistics that are true for people in my situation. They can predict life span for a population. A statisic can't predict lifespan for an inidividual. My intention is to live life as happily as I can, while I can. In some ways, My situation is no different from anyone else. I have today to live and tomorrow is an illusion. I've been stripped of the comfortable dream of immortality. Yes, I know you don't think you're immortal with your head, but you don't carry the knowledge of your mortality in the forefront of your brain. You don't carry it in your heart. Mostly want I want is to live as normally as possible, and toward that end I'm asking people to not address the issue of my disease unless they really must.

I think that effectively shut her down for a while.

Can you believe that she's a nurse?

Off to work!