Round one

24.4.08.

Chemo began on Tuesday the 22nd of April.

It has been less then a month since my MRI revealed lumps in my chest. Within three weeks I have morphed from being perfectly healthy to an exhausted and lethargic mess. Tuesday wasn't nearly as fueled by anxiety or trepidation as I had initially expected. Stewart (my sister's partner) and myself had rocked up to the oncology unit to plug in.

The chemo ward is not what I predicted. I had visions of state of the art machines dispensing liquids of obnoxious primary colors. Doctors in nappy san white coats armed with needles and manicured sets of tubes and pill boxes. The atmosphere is very laid back, with a quaint and almost provincial town charm. Relics and modern day chemo paraphernalia lye scattered around the room as nurses weave and tend to array of cancer patients undergoing treatment. The room is bathed in a glow of both hope and fear. The lounge chair that I found myself in was to be the chair that I ultimately took my first taste of what would be injected into my veins for the next six months. The initiation of the chemo was very un ceremonious as I hadn't realised it had begun (I still thought I was on a saline drip). I watched the first bag of red liquid slowly navigate its way through the maze of tubes into the left crease of my forearm. How the fuck had I traveled this road so quickly. The bags were systematically placed into my IV and began there way into my system . The last bag which takes the longest seemed to cause the most side effects. I began to feel slightly exhausted and a thin veil of cloudiness and unease came over me.

Around the room is a display of the great diversification that is a cancer patient. An elderly man with his son reading the herald sun sports section in the corner. A young male patient and his girlfriend sitting across the way, his Chemo being inserted into his catheter in his chest. Three placid looking middle aged women sitting alone in the other room knitting and playing scrabble.

The bag slowly dripped to a close and my time was up for the fortnight. I removed myself from the factory farm armed with three anti-nausea medications and two pamphlets on support groups I could but probably would never join due to my still disbelief that I was one of them. That I actually was a cancer patient. That just like everybody else in the room I was as justified and somewhat entitled to the support offered.

After chemo I felt exhausted and slightly irritable but generally calm and relieved that I had completed the first chapter of my chemo journey. When I got home I had a nap and was awoken with sharp pains in my lungs and stomach region, my clouded head had returned and I felt a great sense of alarm. Perhaps I would stay in a clouded tunnel for six months nurturing stomach aches and chest pains. The pot hole that I had scrambled from a few days ago felt so very present and had a somewhat permanent presence.

The sensations I am gathering even after only two days are very transient. I am in a constant state of changing physical and mental ailments and challenges. Yet the pain is not memorable nor is the nausea that troubling.