Turning Inside Out

Exhausted. Ragged. Raw.

It's incredible how something that is meant to save you can kill you in the process. How years of technology to battle a disease, an organism living inside you, fighting for your body can have you at moments wishing it was all over and done with. While your insides gurgle and boil, your body is not your own, you're hairless, your hand growing bumps and blisters, chemo is laying to waste the vessel that has been harboring the foreign being now for months, hoping to kill it, to expell it...oh but at what price?

Unable to eat, panting, sweating, chills, intolerable heartburn, nausea, vomiting, endless diarrhea. It's not pretty. Being afraid to sleep through the night because you might wake up find yourself lying in a pool of your own shit since the chemo has rendered you unable to control your bowels. You wipe, and you wipe and you wipe. Basic tissue doesn't cut it anymore. You have to use wet wipes because your flesh has been worn out, just like so much else. Time to be gentle.

That was last night. And I'm beyond tired.

In the morning in the ER, you take off your clothes, put on a hospital gown and assume the identity of someone you never wanted to take. Someone who is sick, someone who is ill and weak. As long and all encompassing as those hospital gowns are, you never feel so naked. So exposed. Your body, a ready pin cushion for more medicine, for more IV's, for more blood to draw and tests to take.
Brace yourself for more medication. The red pill counteracts the yellow pill and the white pill has to be taken before the blue one if the pink one is to take effect. All the while be sure to drink plenty of liquid if you can.

At home now, resting, taking comfort in the food that a dear friend has brought over all I ask for is a good night's sleep and brace for what might be to come and hope it will all be over soon.