Had a 30 minute-long nose bleed this morning for no apparent reason. I’ve never had a nose bleed before so it really freaked me out. I IM’ed Honey and asked him to call Nurse Gari about it since I couldn’t really talk on the phone with a fat wad of kleenex shoved up my nose! Through Honey’s translation, Gari told me to pinch above the bone in the middle of my nose till it stopped, then use olive oil to keep things moist in there. My platelets were a little bit low, though not terribly so, which explains why the bleeding persisted for so long: platelets enable the blood to clot/stop. Anyway, it finally stopped and all is well again.
My experience with my oncologist’s NP yesterday was horrible. As I reported to the hospital’s president today in my response to an automatic survey they always send me after an appointment, “I went in with a sore throat and came out two hours later with a migraine.” I’ll spare you the boring details but let’s just say she is an incompetent, confused, overwhelmed ding dong with a severe lack of a bedside manner. As I further told the president in my survey, “I feel that her ‘patient care’ is a terrible representation of the overall stellar quality of care I’ve otherwise received at UCH.” Somebody actually reads these survey comments…that’s how I ended up working out our problems with Nurse Skippy many months ago and now look–he’s like my bestest friend at the hospital! I imagine someone will be contacting me about this issue but mostly I just requested that I not have to meet with her anymore; that I’d prefer to see Dr Kane herself, or Gari or anybody else for that matter, just not that NP ever again.
My sore throat still lingers but I imagine it will improve in the next day or two after I take another Neupagen shot.
Did I tell you about my art therapy at chemo last week? There is this lady (I think she may be some kind of psychologist) who roams the halls of the Infusion center with a large cart of art supplies: markers, crayons, magazines, various papers, glue, scissors…a preschool teacher’s dream! She offers art therapy sessions to anyone receiving treatment on Fridays. After weeks of missing her or falling asleep before being able to work with her stuff, we finally caught up with each other last week! I had this idea of making a collage with one of my new and favorite affirmations on it and images that complimented the affirmation. The affirmation is: “I am cancer-free and I have a future.” We talked for a long time about my diagnosis and what all else hit the fan last autmn as well as my experience thusfar with chemotherapy and other treatments and decisions. She helped me go through lots of magazines cutting out pictures of places I want to travel to, houses I’d like to see myself living in, babies babies babies, healthy life-style choices, and the like. When we couldn’t find adequate baby pictures, she snuck all the way across the hospital for me, went into the OBGYN waiting room and brought back a few parent and baby-related magazines that were goldmines of pictures for my collage! She was great! After about an hour of working together, she took a lunch break and Carolyn left the room too, leaving me alone with my creative juices flowing like mad! I’m designing this collage on a large circular piece of cardboard. My initial plan of just slapping pictures and words onto the surface of the white background quickly evolved into something more colorful once I discovered her deep stack of what feels and looks like handmade papers in a wide variety of hues. So I started ripping pieces of those papers in purples, greens, yellows and pinks and gluing them on top of the white cardboard circle to serve as a sort of background for my images and words. I worked on this for about two hours or so before I ran out of steam and had to take a short nap while my chemo finished. I was so absorbed in the project of creating that I forgot I was hooked up to a machine that was pumping these crazy drugs into my system! It was wonderful! I didn’t get around to pasting the images onto the circle yet, as I only finished covering half of it with the colored papers. But she gave me a large envelope on which I wrote my name. She helped me gather all the images and papers I’d collected and put them all into the envelope, which she’ll hang onto until the next time I come in to work on it!
As a preschool teacher, I am very familiar with this sort of project, although I’m rarely the one actually making the collage. Instead, I’m usually just cutting out appropriate pictures related to whatever theme we may be working on that week and setting out the papers, scissors and glue. Constantly monitoring the children’s appropriate use of the scissors (not for cutting our own hairs!) and desperately trying to unclog 25 Elmer’s glue bottles. But this time it’s Miss Abbey’s turn to play! I get to cut and glue and have fun creating! In fact, when one bottle of glue I was using clogged up, I set it aside to try another one and the art therapist lady picked it up and tried to unclog it for me! The table has been turned! MWAhahahahah! >:)
She has a sort of support group/art therapy group that meets once a week on I think Wednesday afternoons. I’ve been thinking about wanting to join a support group lately but I have some reservations that I’ll tell you about later. Anyway, from what I understand, these people gather in a room at the other end of the hospital and work on their art projects with her, while sitting around swapping stories, frustrations and building friendships as they go along. It sounds right up my alley, although I’m really afraid of showing up and being surrounded by a bunch of old, dying people. I suppose I should just muster up the courage to show up and if I don’t like the looks or the feel of it, I can always leave if it’s not my cup of tea. We’ll see. I shall put that task in my pile of THINGS TO DO AFTER VACATION (which is mounting higher and higher with every passing day!).
