After the Gold Rush

Here we are at Day +11. I fear the text of this event has been a little anti-climactic for many readers. “if it was supposed to be so tough, why did it take only a couple of paragraphs to tell?” Probably others may feel “enough is enough” “got any good ball scores.” Well, to leave the initial transplant behind, I would offer this summary:

The Core of my autologous SCT experience began on Day -6 and ended, from the perspective of discomfort, about Day +9. During that time, doctors, nurses and assistants asked me probably 75 times “do you feel any pain? On a scale of 1- 10, with 1 being the mildest and 10 being the worst imaginable pain.” By the end of this process, I no longer even playfully considered the high end of that scale. Not that I went there all that often. I really didn’t. But there is a psychic cost to asking yourself that question, once you understand that you may call it 8, only because you feel that a 10 must involve some screaming, and you were unable to do that part. I also learned what I began to suspect before I started: That time is your friend, and pain’s enemy. You can endure a great deal of a feeling that begins: “This will only hurt for about 10 seconds”
On the other hand, a span of 15 minutes can be a life time, if it comes at the end of another hour and 1/2. If you are playing on the deep end of the scale, I swear to God the clock WILL NOT MOVE.

Discomfort is what we call the collective of Nausea, Vomiting and Diarrhea (NVD) and terminal fatigue. Again, this was not at all a regular part of my process. But it will happen before engraftment at least once or twice for a day or two.

This is not the time to reconnect with your adolescent body image issues. (1st rule of SCT for Dummies).
Most hair ejects from your body. Various blisters and rashes overtake most available skin. Nails warp or die. And you should see the other guys!! (Actually, I believe most of the other patients in the SCT units were male at the time I was there. And most of them seemed to be having a more complicated process than me. They all took it well.) Imagine a bunch of old, very bald, guys with funny pajamas, sitting in the corridor doing shoulder rolls for our physical therapist. Imagine me in that group.
Probably like me, they had no idea where the necessary resolve would come from (not the place for the style of good form, sorry). But we all had it and leave, I hope, with something to spare for another time.
And if they are like me, they will have no bright line memory of any one event that made this whole thing such a biblical struggle.

January 8, 2010