Chapter 4

Now starts the second treatment for breast cancer. She gets scheduled for
a full mastectomy and some chemo. The Clinic she's at has a ward
specially designed for foreign dignitaries; Arabian princes and the like.
Her doctor is a smart one and works it out that his mastectomy patients
go there for recovery. It makes them feel a little better to recover in
what is essentially a high class hotel with rich wooden furniture and
nicely carpeted floors. After that the weekly chemo starts. This, of
course, leads to a few days of throwing up and generally feeling crappy.
Some of those weeks I get to help her out and take care of her and her
daughter. Saying I do this happily would be wrong, but I am happier than
if someone else were doing it. At least I'm with them.

Her boss is a great guy and arranges for many things for her. During the
treatments she gets long term disability. In the few months between the
different treatements she gets to work from home most days. Even with
this she can't afford to live on her own anymore and so moves back in
with her parents. A decision I don't like, but not one I can do anything
about. In the end, it turns out to be a fairly good thing. She gets
scheduled for a stem cell transplant and her retired parents are in a
better position to take care of her daughter than I am for the time
being.

Now, for those of you not familiar with a stem cell transplant, here's how
it works. First, they take suck some of your own stem cells out of you and
freeze them. That's the easy part. Then they stick you in a virtually
sterile room as they give you very high dosages of chemotherapy. Since
chemo is really just a poison, it ends up pretty much killing everything
inside you, including your immune system, hence the sterile environment.
Finally they give you your stem cells back and wait about a month until
they get back to doing their job of giving you an immune system.

Even now I still can't imagine spending an entire month confined in a
sterile room despite my at least daily visits. There were good days when
she was awake and active. I would bring a few movies to watch or a game
to play. Other days she was extremely lethargic and could barely greet
me. Those days afforded me much reading time. On her more active days
she would try to insist that I not show up. "I don't want you to see me
like this," she would tell me. I always ignored those requests. She
admitted to me much later that despite her insistance, she was always
happy to see me and looked forward to my visits.

Having been a long distance runner her entire life, her heart rate and
blood pressure were rather low to begin with. I remember a many days I
was there when the nurse would come in to check vitals and would go to
start the blood pressure check a second time and I would just say "No, it
really is that low." There were definately days the nurses wondered how
she was living. She spent much of the time on an oxygen feed. Her month
in the sterile room ended a little bit early when she had congestive
heart failure and she was transferred to the cardiac ward for a few more
weeks. Daily visits continued.

Continue reading Chapter 5.