A Crock of Shit

Chuck Palahniuk wrote “Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.”

In the middle of the night, there is a quick rush to get untangled from sheets and get to where you need to be. Sometimes you get there in time. Sometimes you don’t.

At first, the inconvenience of it is an annoyance. As time goes on and the crap just continues relentlessly, you get tired of the need to be near your porcelain pal. When the intestines are not on overdrive, your stomach decides to act up. If it’s not one, it’s the other. Worst are the moments when they both stage a revolt. The doctor assures you this is par for the course.

Your taste buds begin to come back. Flavors are starting to become familiar once more. But in a cosmic joke, your appetite is non-existent. Despite the reawakening of those taste buds, you have no real desire for food and your current situation makes your diet a mild one of innocuous foods. Dietary changes have not made any difference.

Cultures are taken and the dreaded c.diff bacterium, the Golgothan shit demon, is not detected. You’re cleared to start probiotics and given an uber-immodium to take. But this is not a prophylactic medication, you can only take it when the crap begins to hit the fan. So it slows it down, shortens the amount of days it lasts, but it doesn’t keep it from starting up. It’s not an immediate fix. And it does nothing for your stomach.

After three weeks of this, you find that your energy is gone. Those walks around the house are few and far between. Those five steps up and down are on hold for now. The progress you made in stamina and endurance has regressed. You are less steady than you have been in a while. Days are filled with naps.

You monitor your sessions by keeping a calendar diary of your digestive system. You call the stem cell team every few days to check in with the current status. At this point, it’s a fact finding period of time. Maybe the data will reveal a better path to take.

Prior to the in-patient seven day chemo marathon, you were given medications to protect your mouth, stomach and intestines from the beneficial poisons. These are the meds that

thickened the membranes to keep any ulcerations at bay. They did their job. They did it well. They are also the meds that began this upset, playing with your carefully balanced internal bacteria. We begin to hypothesize. Maybe the return of taste buds indicates a return to norm. The thickening of the membranes began in your mouth and worked their way through your system. Could the needed balance begin the same? Could it work its way through your system and put an end to this? Is it starting now? How much longer will this be our norm?

At fifty days post-transplant, this is not where we thought we would be. It’s hard to keep spirits up with this unrelenting discomfort. Our task is now to find either a resolution to the physical ills or the spiritual ones. If there is a pattern to these sessions, we need to find it and make the most of them. If there is not, then we need to find our way to living fully with the uncertainty of each day. The humanist and philosopher Erasmus, who was also known by the very flowery Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus… a name that brings a smile… wrote “There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”

So now the plan is to be amongst those who turn the dream world into a new reality. ‘Cuz this reality is full of crap!