Tag Archives: health

+100 For Quality of Life

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I haven’t been this excited after leaving a hospital visit since… well, wait… I’ve never been excited after leaving a hospital visit.

But today, after Dr. Leiro told me that even in the worst case scenario he thought they would be able to close up my colostomy, I felt more elated than I have since… I don’t know when.

Yup, I finally got to see one of Argentina’s best surgeons. He asked me a bunch of questions to get him up to speed, took a look at my PET scans — thankfully, he did not stick his fingers up my ass so I was spared that humiliation in front of Joel — and then gave me his assessment and recommendations.

The lesions on the liver, as I already knew, were no longer visible on the scans. But what I didn’t know, and what the folks at Marie Curie didn’t tell me, was that the rectal tumor was no longer visible, either. That doesn’t mean it’s not there; it just means that it’s smaller than the 1 cm that the very expensive machine can detect. So the cancer has not mutated and is still responding to chemotherapy.

That’s all good news.

However, the metastases in the peritoneum pose a different problem. They are small, but there are three of them. Leiro said that there may be more. In fact, it’s likely that there is. They may open me up and find a spread of cancer on my abdominal lining — several smaller masses that are not detectable via scan. That would be bad news.

On the other hand, he said that the three that are visible are also operable. My oncologists thought that they might not be. So I’m not looking at a cure but there is hope that I will be able to improve my quality of life by removing the colostomy and all the embarrassment, discomfort, demoralization and expense it engenders.

I might just have more life — more humane life — than I thought.

12 cyclos

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I felt like such a pussy, apprehensive and even fearful of this second cycle of chemo in this particular round of three. The first few days are really irritating — having to wear gloves inside, not being able to touch anything cold with my bare hands. Even washing my hands annoys me, ’cause the hot water dries cool and the neuropathy sets in almost immediately. It still gets chilly outside in Buenos Aires’ current reluctant spring and so my feet tingle and go numb as I walk, as do my hands. And lords, do I hate the wind.

But the older guy sitting across from me in the relatively cheery chemo room in Hospital Marie Curie told me that he was just starting his 12th round. He has colorectal cancer, too, but had been in remission for a while. But it came back, as it usually does when it’s metastasized.

He asked me if my bald head was because of the chemo. I told him no, I’d only lost my nose hairs and, pointing to my crotch, my pubes. He said, “Lo perdí todo. Todo!” and laughed, gesturing across his legs and his arms. And his crotch.

He asked me how long it had been since I’d been diagnosed.

“6 meses, más o menos?” he suggested, saying he’d seen me around.

I said, no, that I’d been in another hospital before, and than it had been over a year ago.

He nodded and I felt embarrassed. He’d noticed me but I hadn’t noticed him.

I think of myself as more observant than most people, but for some reason this guy had gone beneath my radar. We’d been visiting the same doctors in the same hospital — although I’m sure I’d remember if we’d gotten chemo together — and I hadn’t seen him.

He was a handsome guy — older than me and with a nicer smile; thin with a thicker midriff, broad shoulders, long arms and legs. He was wearing cool socks, too: Blue and white, with a kind of oceanic motif. Billabong?  But I tend to notice younger dudes when I’m out and about. Like the skinny, trashy one with a shaved head a couple seats down from me, laughing and joking with the older women around him. His head was shaved and he was missing most of his front teeth.

“What do you  think of that?” Joel probed. He was my designated companion for the day.

“Doesn’t bother me at all,” I answered. ‘And those homemade tattoos? Totally hot.”

And: “I want to take his picture.”

Joel just laughed.

Poison was dripping slowly into all our veins, but the mood was light and everybody tries to make friends on these days.

Making connections, however short or temporary, is better than sitting alone, taped up and injected, just counting your cycles.

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Last Christmas I gave you my colon

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Or, at least part of it.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the worst month of my life — other than the month my mother died, which actually seemed to extend into years. It was the month my colon split in two due to being occluded by a colorectal tumor. (I learned “occluded” was the right word to use the other day when I met the surgeon who will be cutting me open in March.)

So I was in Rivadavia public hospital over the holidays. I don’t pay attention to holidays much anyway except to resent the curtailment on my grocery shopping. I don’t mind, however, the lack of people on the streets.

One year ago, the lack of people in the hospital ward turned out to be a problem.

I don’t really understand how one gets hired as a nurse at Rivadavia. Sometimes it seemed the only requirement was the ability to wear scrubs. No one was consistently trained. There was only one nurse per shift who could change my colostomy bag and it was clear she didn’t like doing it. But who would?

I was always having problems keeping my IV in. A couple times it pulled out and there was no one who knew how to put it back in. I looked forward to the night shift when a very hard-working and handsome young dude could put right whatever went wrong during the day. I could tell he had goals other than collecting a meager pay check.

In any case, anyone who’s lived in Buenos Aires knows that the level of competence everywhere lowers considerably over the holidays. It’s no different in the public health care system. Random friends of nurses get hired as temps to man the wards and reception desks. They may nor may not be nurses. They might have been one in a past life.

Christmas-Eve day was the first time I was allowed to eat solid food. Previously, I’d subsisted on unseasoned mashed squash that had sat under a hot lamp for half a day. I can’t say I ate a lot of it though. Subsequently, my bag was never very full.

As a treat, Claire went out and bought me a real meal — Claire, always Claire. She found some recommended restaurant nearby and ordered up their roasted chicken breast lunch special. I was ravenous and it tasted delicious. (No veggies allowed, though — encourages diarrhea.) I enjoyed one of the best meals I’d had in Buenos Aires — hooked up to an IV, sitting in my skivvies and chatting with Claire near the open window while the warm winter air blew in.

I paid for that meal later.

I took a nap, full of pollo, and woke up hours later to a dim, mostly empty ward. Somebody new had arrived in the bed across from me. He had big green, friendly eyes, curly-hair, and a couple blond, fuzzy dreadlocks. He also had a pained look on his face and a tube in his stomach. But everybody on this ward had a tube, or three or four, in their stomachs.

We chatted in Spanglish for a bit until I noticed a whiff of something unpleasant. Something sharp and fecal.

Oh, gods.

I pulled up my shirt and examined my colostomy bag. The sticky part had come unglued and it gaped open, full of half-digested light meat. I’d never seen it so full before. It had, in fact, never been so full before. That chicken had certainly looked smaller going in. At any rate, it hadn’t looked capable of causing such catastrophe.

The dreadlocked boy asked me what was wrong. I explained. Or rather, I struggled for the Spanish and then pointed near my waistline and said, breathlessly, “Ca-ca!”

(As I told my niece the other day, the first thing to go in the hospital is your dignity.)

Yes, this was the part of every conversation I have now when people are curious about the bulge underneath my shirt or wonder why I don’t buy much toilet paper.

His eyes widened and he said he’d go look for the nurse. We hadn’t seen or heard one since I’d woken up. He dashed off.

By the time he came back, long enough for shit to spill out onto the bed, I’d managed to stumble to the toilet — the one with a hole in the wall and a rubber hose that served as the shower — and began trying to remove the bag and clean myself. I’d already dribbled bile and shit along the way and was no longer feeling the Christmas spirit.

Dreadlocked boy told me there was a nurse but she didn’t know anything about colostomy bags. She was a friend of a day-shift nurse and hadn’t practiced the craft since she was, ahem, younger.

I had a moment of panic thinking that I would somehow have to last the night without a bag. But then, a short, fake-blond middle-aged woman waddled in with one in her hand. She told me she didn’t know how to put it on — I would have to do it.

I just nodded, shit on my fingers. I’d seen it done every day for a month so I figured I could replace the bag. Cleaning up after myself seemed far more challenging. The dreadlocked boy stood behind the “nurse,” looking both relieved and appalled.

The nurse did have the skills to write down everything, I guess, because the day after Christmas my doctor teased me by asking if I’d been drunk on Christmas Eve. If only.

Happy Fucking Holidays!