Memories of Last Month

.
Hi all! Well, I start chemo again tomorrow, so it's once more into the breach, dear friends. I'm a little wiser than I was before all this excitement. Starting the week after chemo and for the week after that, I'm going to pretend that I don't have a single white blood cell in my body. I will take all the precautions, do all the washing, take my temperature about every two hours, and hope for the best. I will be helped by the fact that they will be giving me what are known as growth factors which will help my body produce more red and white blood cells.

I also thought (hoped) it might be interesting to get my perspective and memories of ICU and hospital life in general. Rather than try to capture it all at once, I thought I would add a memory each day to lure you back here. Let me say that I have almost no memory of my time at St. Mary's hospital. I remember getting there, I remember them declaring me neutropenic (extremely low in white blood cells), and I remember parts of the ambulance ride to Georgetown. I had no idea I had spent the night there and still have no memory of it.

The first week and a half a Georgetown is gone. They doped me up pretty extensively, plus it appears that the blood flow to my brain was inadvertently reduced when they put the lines in place for my first session of dialysis. Once that was fixed, my recovery was almost exponential. It was during that recovery that I began to regain, if not conciousness, then at least lucidity. Now remember, I'm saying lucidity, but I was still fabulously loopy.

My first memory is "waking up" lying on my side, looking at an odd machine, and listening as a lady in the room was getting all excited because of the LED on the machine that read "400". I didn't know why this was exciting, nor did I care. I just wanted to get up. As I started to put my plan into action, I suddenly heard my brother Wilson's voice behind me, "Tim, you have to lay down." I had no idea why Wilson was there, but if he said lie down, I was lying down. Without Wilson, it probably would have taken a couple of nurses and a return to the wrist straps to keep me in place. We went through the "don't get up" drill several more times during the dialysis session, but I like to think I always listened. Wilson saved me a lot of pain.

Let me give you an indication of just how loopy I was: Once I was aware enough to talk, the doctors would periodically ask me three questions. "What's your name?" "What year is it?" "Where are you?" I was always good with my name, I could never remember if it was 2009 or 2010, but for some reason I became convinced (and told several doctors over a two day span) that I was in a refrigerator house somewhere near the Arctic Circle. And I believed it. Slowly, reality seeped back in, but that's where my head was. (As an aside, you should know that earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks in a "refrigerator house" in beautiful Thule, Greenland--about 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was actually more of a "reverse freezer", keeping the warm in and the cold out. So this wasn't completely divorced from reality.)

More later in the week, with my insights into some pictures that you've already seen.

Have a great week.