Let’s Catch Up

Hey there Ballers! I know it’s been quite some time since you’ve heard from me. I wish I could say I’ve been using that time writing and creating new content for Ball Out, but the truth is I’ve just been trying to get back into a normal routine after finishing up chemotherapy. It hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be. I’ve often felt like I’m on my heels just getting through each day, but I’m not here to tell you a sob story though, and I know everyone has their daily struggles, that’s just life. It comes with the territory. I also stopped writing during the last of my treatment because my brain capacity wasn’t there. I felt lost in a fog and often I was just an empty husk. I felt like anything I wrote wouldn’t come out well, so there was no point in trying to tell a shitty story. With that, I’ll use this time to fill you in on what happened in the last bit of my treatment.

Last you heard from me; I just went for a run after finishing up my first round of chemo. Well as you probably thought when you read that I did that, it wasn’t my best idea. I felt like I got hit by a train the next day, and it set the tone for that next week of chemo. I had been told to eat more protein during this time. So, I decided to try out a new protein cereal that I found. 10 minutes later I was hunched over the toilet looking at my cereal again. I came to find out, a couple of days later, that nuts and my treatment did not agree. As you can imagine, my motivation to go sit in a chair for 8 hours was not there but accepting that there was no running from I pulled myself together and got ready for my day. It was the usual routine once we got to the hospital, we checked into oncology, then waited until they called my name where I’d go to get my port accessed. Then off my blood went to get checked, and once the results were back, we’d get a rundown of them by my doctor or his PA, then I was off to go sit in my chair. By this point, I was becoming a regular, and I had taken a liking to a certain chair, which the nurses had taken notice of. By the end of my treatment, they would have it set up for me when I would come in for the day. There was nothing truly special about the chair itself, it was just the fact that it was closest to the bathroom, which proved convenient after being pumped full of fluids and having to take a leak every 20 minutes.

Once I was hooked up to my pump, I’d try my best to get comfortable, but there was always an uneasiness to being there. At the start I would keep myself busy with trying to write, fighting to keep my focus and my thoughts clear. The deafening silence of the other patients in the room was broken by the constant sound of our pumps pushing drugs through our hoses and the various beeps to signal when a fluid was done. Day after day this was life, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get to me. It was hard sitting in that chair. Every day it only got worse, the more you sat the more it took from you. I didn’t feel it right away, but about halfway through the 2nd long week I noticed I wasn’t as hungry as I would normally be, I felt more tired, and my eyes and mind were foggier. The only thing was to endure. Get through this then life will get back to normal. I’d repeat this to myself day in and day out. On the third day of treatment of that cycle, I once again attempted to eat that protein cereal, before talking to my doctor about it, and once again found myself over the toilet. It was at that point that I decided to stop trying to eat that cereal. Alas, the damage was done for the day. With my stomach already upset, while waiting to start my treatment for the day I was overcome with a wave of claustrophobia. I felt suffocated by my mask, my breathing and heart rate spiked, and I felt like I was going to throw up all over the room. From there on out, the nurses would often increase the dosage of my nausea medication. The chemo hit me hard and I was living on the verge of throwing up at any minute. As you can imagine, my life was uneventful during all of this so there’s not too much to talk about besides me throwing up in the shower and how poor Shannon would clean up the mess. There was also an absurd number of times that Blue, our dog, and I would be chased down the street by dogs escaping from their yards. Which also did not bode well for me, I was so weak and out of shape, I thought I was going to have a heart attack when we were finally in the clear. I also tried to carry all 80 pounds of him to avoid a dog fight and learned that was a mistake soon after. I think I carried him all of 10 feet before I had to put him down again. Fortunately, all dogs remained unharmed!

By the time my 3rd cycle was about to start, I was run down, and I felt like a zombie. The first week went off without any issues, which I took as a good sign as my treatment was coming to an end. That optimism didn’t last long though, after finishing up the only day of treatment in my 2nd week of the cycle, I came home and wasn’t feeling right. My temperature was starting to spike, I felt weaker than normal, and my stomach was more upset. I did my best to battle the symptoms but to no avail. By the time Shannon had gotten home from work, my temperature was over 100.4 degrees, which normally doesn’t seem too bad, but for a chemo patient, it could mean bad news. When going through treatment, your immune system is obliterated. The likelihood of getting an infection or virus at any time is significantly increased. We got into her car and were off to the ER. Once we were there, we flashed my “chemo fast pass” and were given a separate space to wait until I was called. After several blood draws and temperature checks the doctors decided they wanted to keep me until they could rule out any infections or viruses. They failed to tell me that those blood culture test results would take days to come back and that since I came in with a “fever” I fell under the Covid protocol of not being allowed to have visitors until I had 2 consecutive negative PCR test results. This meant that after I finally convinced Shannon to go home and go get some sleep, I wouldn’t see her for another 4 days. We found this out the next morning when she came back and was informed that she couldn’t see me. While I waited for a room to open, Shannon went home and packed me a bag. It was around dinner time that I was finally brought upstairs from the ER rooms to my room, where I would stay until Saturday morning, it was only Tuesday. It honestly felt like torture being there. I wasn’t allowed visitors, and I was feeling like shit from my treatment. Nurses would come and go taking more blood and giving fluids without accessing my port because they couldn’t do it right and I was never fully informed of what was going on. On top of this, the roller coaster of diarrhea and constipation from chemo and my nausea meds was starting to catch up to me in the worst way. Hemorrhoids. I could feel them growing worse every day, but more on that later. Towards the end of my torturous stay, my nausea caught up to me as well and I would throw up after eating, but I refused to tell the nurses for fear that I would be stuck there even longer. Shannon was finally allowed to come to see me on Friday, where she spent all day with me until she had to go home. It felt so good to be in her presence. It gave me a little bit of life again. The next morning, I finally met with my overseeing doctor, and he told me all my cultures and tests came back negative, so I was free to go. We chalked it up to just having a bad reaction to that day of treatment. I pretty much sprinted out of the hospital and told Shannon to floor it to take me home.

The following Monday was my last day of chemo! I was so excited to just get in and get out and be done with treatment. It had been a long time coming and after the last week, I was just ready to put everything behind me and move on with my life. This time there was no bad reaction to the chemo in terms of a fever. But those hemorrhoids would come back to haunt me. As the week went on it kept growing and growing and had gotten so painful any movement would cause me significant pain. I spent most of my time sprawled out on the couch trying not to move. One day I was laying there watching Ridiculousness, and it happened to be the “nastiest” episode, which had me running to the toilet after 5 minutes of watching people throw up. That Saturday I was feeling a little better, and it just so happened my friends were going out to brunch to see a friend who was back in town for a little bit. I knew I probably shouldn’t go, but after 3 months of not seeing my friends, and just finishing up chemo I decided we were going to go and join them and get out of the house. I struggled through sitting in the wooden chairs. The pressure on my hemorrhoids was agonizing, but out of sheer stubbornness, I wasn’t going to leave early. I brought the cushion my friends had bought me way back for my orchiectomy to provide some relief, but it was barely effective. After parting ways, I came home and vegged out on the couch again until I felt my stomach start to rumble. I knew what was coming. I got up and sat on the toilet. When I finished up losing some weight, I started wiping and suddenly, for lack of better terminology, it became slick. Confused but what I just experienced, I looked at the toilet paper, and I saw a lot of pus and blood. My hemorrhoid had burst. Scared I kept wiping and wiping, checking to see if the bleeding had stopped. The more I wiped the more blood there was, so I decided to pack it with some toilet paper, and once again head to the ER. Twice in two weeks, I apparently couldn’t get enough of the place. Once again flashing my fast pass, I was taken back and examined. I can honestly say I have never felt so violated as I was that night. I had a couple of doctors lay me on my side, had me spread my cheeks then they aggressively squeezed the open wound to see if anything else would come out. This coupled with some CT scans showed that the infected hemorrhoid was being drained naturally by my body and I would not require surgery to get it drained. They sent me on my way with a prescription for antibiotics, and I was glad to once again be out of the ER. On the road to recovery, I had my follow-ups with my oncologist where my results would continuously show that the treatment had done its job. I started to increase my activity levels, working out when I could, seeing my friends and family more, and eventually getting back to work. I was starting to feel like a real human again, starting to feel alive again.