Tomorrow is supposed to be my "bottoming out" day. Supposedly my red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets will be at their lowest. Best case scenario is my numbers are within range and they kick me out of there allowing me to resume my normal activities...which quite frankly, since the surgery and unemployment I haven't had any "normal activities" to speak of. Worst case scenario, my numbers are dangerously low and they check me into the hospital until they come back up. It's not that big of a deal, except the hospital TVs aren't high definition and they don't have any of the good channels I have become accustomed to in my weeks of lying on the couch moaning. They check other numbers in your blood too, including liver function, which leads me to a peculiar observation.
One side effect that wasn't mentioned in our chemo class is a strange discoloration in the toilet. For a day or two, no matter what business I had in the bathroom, it was coming out yellow. Now for half of the bathroom business that is perfectly normal. For the other half, you are perplexed and wondering just how many bananas you ate. First time, I thought it was a fluke. Second time, I was a little more concerned. Third time, I opened the big folder we received at chemo class and poured over it, trying to figure out exactly where this particular side effect would be listed. Having my oncologist's twenty-four hour number and e-mail, I decided the best thing to do would be...look it up on the internet. I just sat there on Google's web search for a while trying to figure out the best way to search this, without coming up with a bunch of disgusting (well even more disgusting) results. Finally a found a combo of words that looked this up as a medical curiosity and not a fetish. Surprisingly there was a lot of information on the subject. My research seemed to narrow it down to one of two things. Either it was no big deal and it would go away with time, or it meant I was in liver failure and I would probably die before I finished reading the article. This is not the type of information you want to read right before bedtime.
I go to bed, eyes wide open, trying to see if I can feel my liver dying. I can't. I get back up and get back on the internet for more information. Most of the sites that say you are going to die immediately mention that you will also notice your eyes turning yellow as it gets more serious. I don't know if that means you are getting full of crap up to your eyeballs or what. But, that hasn't happened yet, so I guess I still have time to finish today's blog entry before I die. And in my tired state I wonder, if the whites of my eyes turn yellow, can I go get a kid's pair of sunglasses with the blue lenses and make my eyes look green, because that would be cool. Or red lenses and they'd be orange. Well, it didn't matter. After checking my eyes repeatedly every time I walk past a mirror, so far no yellow. But this is something I am going to ask the nurse about. Not if I am OK, I'm asking why she didn't warn us about that in the class. Getting up from doing work like that and seeing yellow is a little startling. It must be some chemo nurse practical joke that they do. "Hey Susan, you see that guy over there, I didn't tell him his poop turns yellow." I do think I heard two nurses laughing hysterically as I was leaving chemo.
However, this is one of the few times my gastro-intestinal problems have helped me in life. One of the big problems with many chemotherapy drugs is...well back-ups. So much so that many patients come out of chemo with major hemorrhoids. My main GI problem is that I go too often in that respect. When we met with my GI doctor, he said the easy thing for me, instead of having to take the drugs to counteract the chemo effects, I could just quit taking most of my regular drugs for my GI issues. And it worked! My GI issues and my chemo side effects have combined to make me feel like I normal crapper...well except for the yellowness. I will take discoloration over hemorrhoids any day!
As I prepare for tomorrow, I am trying to think of anything I need to take in case I do get checked in to the hospital, although I am not feeling too bad, just really tired. And I am trying to think of the best way to ask my chemo nurse about miscolored manure. Hopefully, I will be back on here tomorrow to let you know what happened!
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