A PERIWINKLE IN TIME

Today: Chemo.

Tomorrow: The World!

No, rewind. Erase. Skip the world part and let’s start over at the chemo part.

Now, I had read that chemo is the thing that makes you really sick in Candyland. You get an infusion. You throw up. You throw up some more. You die. You come back to life. Then you die again.

So I was wildly disappointed when I went in, they tested my blood, they pushed a big syringe of Vincristine (which, by the way, derives from the periwinkle), then they told me not to pick my nose and eat it because my boogers would be toxic, and they sent me on my merry way.

No throwing up. No coding. No golden light. No watching medicos revive me from the corner of the room. I didn’t even feel the IV go in.

“Will I get sick from this?” I asked my sweet technician Glen.

“Honestly? Probably not,” he smilingly told me. “Your biggest side effect will most likely be constipation, maybe some dizziness, and you might get a little fuzzy headed.”

Grrrrr, I thought.

“I already have all those symptoms,” I explained. “Can’t I have something impressive and new and cancery?”

“Don’t hope for that,” he said.

So for now, I’ll go in once a week for my chemo “push,” which is supposed to interrupt cancer cells’ ability to reproduce and acts as a “radio-sensitizer,” which is a very fancy way of saying the chemo makes the radiation more effective.

Ah ah ah ah ah ah oh ai-y-ai. Push it real good.