Okay so it's getting rougher now. My brother had his second 21-day cycle last week, and this week has been efficiently FUCKED UP. He's been dizzy and nauseous since last Thursday. No puking, just a constant feeling of needing to puke. He's always a bit dizzy, and sometimes gets strong dizzy spells. He hasn't had a strong appetite, cuz he's worried that if he eats too much he'll throw it up. But he's also worried about not eating enough. I love paradoxes. His sleep cycle is way fucked up now. He'll go to bed at 10pm, wake up at 3am, stay up until 9:30am, sleep till 2pm... so he never gets a full length deep sleep. It always seems to get interrupted with dizzyness and upset stomach.
His mouth no longer has the nasty salty taste. It's been replaced with a pasty taste. Still gross. No food tastes good to him. At all. How the fuck can ice cream not taste good? How can a fat steak not taste good? I can't think how much that sucks.
He's had these anti-nauseum pills to keep his stomach and dizzyness calmed down. Unfortunately, he woke up with terrible hives all over his belly and across his shoulders. So he's gonna stop taking that pill and just lay on the couch for now. The hives don't look too bad today, not nearly as red and gross looking, but there's still little spots all over him. I had to give my best Chuck Shuldiner "LEPROSY" growl for him cuz he looks like the album cover. Heh heh. We just think the pill gave him a bad reaction, so we'll see how he looks tonight.
He had lumps under his armpits. The human body is loaded with lymph nodes around the neck and throat, the armpits, the groin and thighs. We think one of them just got swollen (either from reacting to the chemo or from a minor infection) and the doc gave him some antibiotics to help keep his system safe from infection. So he's avoiding any and all unnecessary visitors and trips outside the house. We got a downloaded copy of Star Wars Ep III so he didn't have to sit in a germ-infested movie theater.
His insurance company is thoroughly incompetent. His work keeps asking him to fax all this paperwork. So we did. WEEKS AGO. Only this week did he get a call saying "Oh we don't seem to have your material, and we wanted to know how much longer you'll be on disability blah blah blah I have a corn cob stuck up my whiny vagina blah blah blah somebody put me out of my misery and beat me with a bowl of spaghetti blah blah blah..." so I refaxed a shitload for him at work and made some unforgiving phone calls. NOW they have all our shit. Yeah. No kidding. Gotta bust yer balls before anything happens. How lovely.
Okay. Yeah, it sure seems like a lot of shitty stuff, but the good side of this all, is SHITLOADS of guitar playing! He got that Zakk Wylde guitar quite broken in now, and he ordered a new ESP LTD MF207 7-string geetar which should be here this weekend. Lotsa test recordings and practicing and noodling around. As soon as he's normalized and healthy again, we're recording all the rhythm tracks to our songs and then our drummer will have tons of material to practice to. Then maybe we set up the microphones and record the drums in August or maybe September. Then we just record stuff as we have time to. We're not really in a hurry to get a demo made, but everyone keeps asking us for a disc. But we gotta make one first!
So I guess we'll expect everything to get better now and normalize. But I'm worried that the third cycle will really kick his ass. Cuz the body only gets weaker and weaker as the chemotherapy continues. The third week-long treatment should start June 6. Then we allow recovery time, and get his body rescanned and retested to see how the cancer reacted to the treatment. But I have a feeling that he'll really feel like shit the third time. So by then, I'll have cut out all my extracurricular activities. Our friends already know that it should happen, so when we disappear for a month straight, they'll understand. Then he heals, and gets back to normal. And hopefully some hair will start growing back. And then he'll be safe to go out with a healthy immune system again.
And then we rock this fuckin planet from Greenland to Antarctica.
His mouth no longer has the nasty salty taste. It's been replaced with a pasty taste. Still gross. No food tastes good to him. At all. How the fuck can ice cream not taste good? How can a fat steak not taste good? I can't think how much that sucks.
He's had these anti-nauseum pills to keep his stomach and dizzyness calmed down. Unfortunately, he woke up with terrible hives all over his belly and across his shoulders. So he's gonna stop taking that pill and just lay on the couch for now. The hives don't look too bad today, not nearly as red and gross looking, but there's still little spots all over him. I had to give my best Chuck Shuldiner "LEPROSY" growl for him cuz he looks like the album cover. Heh heh. We just think the pill gave him a bad reaction, so we'll see how he looks tonight.
He had lumps under his armpits. The human body is loaded with lymph nodes around the neck and throat, the armpits, the groin and thighs. We think one of them just got swollen (either from reacting to the chemo or from a minor infection) and the doc gave him some antibiotics to help keep his system safe from infection. So he's avoiding any and all unnecessary visitors and trips outside the house. We got a downloaded copy of Star Wars Ep III so he didn't have to sit in a germ-infested movie theater.
His insurance company is thoroughly incompetent. His work keeps asking him to fax all this paperwork. So we did. WEEKS AGO. Only this week did he get a call saying "Oh we don't seem to have your material, and we wanted to know how much longer you'll be on disability blah blah blah I have a corn cob stuck up my whiny vagina blah blah blah somebody put me out of my misery and beat me with a bowl of spaghetti blah blah blah..." so I refaxed a shitload for him at work and made some unforgiving phone calls. NOW they have all our shit. Yeah. No kidding. Gotta bust yer balls before anything happens. How lovely.
Okay. Yeah, it sure seems like a lot of shitty stuff, but the good side of this all, is SHITLOADS of guitar playing! He got that Zakk Wylde guitar quite broken in now, and he ordered a new ESP LTD MF207 7-string geetar which should be here this weekend. Lotsa test recordings and practicing and noodling around. As soon as he's normalized and healthy again, we're recording all the rhythm tracks to our songs and then our drummer will have tons of material to practice to. Then maybe we set up the microphones and record the drums in August or maybe September. Then we just record stuff as we have time to. We're not really in a hurry to get a demo made, but everyone keeps asking us for a disc. But we gotta make one first!
So I guess we'll expect everything to get better now and normalize. But I'm worried that the third cycle will really kick his ass. Cuz the body only gets weaker and weaker as the chemotherapy continues. The third week-long treatment should start June 6. Then we allow recovery time, and get his body rescanned and retested to see how the cancer reacted to the treatment. But I have a feeling that he'll really feel like shit the third time. So by then, I'll have cut out all my extracurricular activities. Our friends already know that it should happen, so when we disappear for a month straight, they'll understand. Then he heals, and gets back to normal. And hopefully some hair will start growing back. And then he'll be safe to go out with a healthy immune system again.
And then we rock this fuckin planet from Greenland to Antarctica.
