second verse, same as the first

I spent the night in the hospital last week. This sounds bad, but it was for the best reason. I must have finally bugged my doctors enough to give in (or, you know, they deemed it medically safe), because they finally agreed to take my trach out.  

There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. I never expected to be at a point in my life where I was excited to get a life-saving breathing implement pulled out of my trachea. I mean, I also hadn’t planned to spend the latter half of the year fighting cancer, but that’s life for you. It’s a real bitch sometimes and throws things at you that you never could have anticipated. I guess that’s kind of the whole deal with life, yeah?

I chatted a bit with the nurse the night I was in the hospital, as she crushed up my pills so I could take them via my feeding tube (I still can’t swallow pills safely...I assume, I guess I haven’t tried). About how I’d never expected for any of this to happen, and I certainly I never thought I’d get to a point where I would just be casually giving myself water and meds and food via a tube in my stomach while chatting with another person. 

It was strange to be back in the hospital again. I was on the same floor as I was after surgery, but I’m in such a different place now, both mentally and physically. When I was admitted after surgery, I could barely walk a lap around the ward, even with the help of a walker. I needed help getting in and out of bed. I needed help changing. Going to the bathroom. I couldn’t speak at all, couldn’t even make a sound because of the trach taking up so much room in my airway. I wasn’t breathing on my own. My face, tongue, and neck were all so swollen that I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. In fact, I’d keep my eyes averted any time I was greeted with my reflection. This is what I thought I looked like, minus all the blood and the undead-ness:

But Joe said I looked more like this:

Either way…I was in a not-so-great place.

This time? I walked to my room on my own. Got into my super cool hospital gown by myself (this time it came with pants, size 2XL, that Joe said looked like Hammer pants). Hopped into bed and made myself comfortable. I knew how all the machines worked. What time the nurses would be stopping by. And, I recognized some of the staff there and they recognized me. It was nice to be back having made some sort of progress. One nurse, after walking into my room and being greeted by me, exclaimed, “oh my god, you can talk now!” 

I don’t know why, but it made me feel proud? Like I’d accomplished something? Even though all I’ve been doing is...literally living? Just trying to get through each day, maybe having made some progress, but most of the time, any progress is so tiny that I don’t notice it day-by-day. 

Things are getting harder with radiation, and I just started my fourth week. I have another round of chemo tomorrow. The doctors say the side effects of both are cumulative, so the last half of my treatment is probably going to be pretty miserable. But if I’ve learned anything throughout this journey so far, it’s that sometimes the misery becomes the norm. The things that felt so uncomfortable and horrible when they were new are things you eventually can get used to. And then, later, when those things go away? It feels like magic.  

The nurse that night I spent in the hospital asked me what the surgery recovery had been like. I told her that, surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as I’d been anticipating. That maybe my imagination had been making it worse than it really was, or that maybe I was blocking out the really shitty stuff (which is entirely possible, I do remember being pretty damn miserable most of the time I was in the hospital). 

Either way, it means that, however miserable the next few weeks are, the next couple of months, really, it’s only temporary. And there might be a day next January, February, March, when someone asks how things went, and I won’t be able to remember how horrible I felt. So I’m holding out for that day.