Saturday

Yesterday, Friday, our Courageous Cowboy got his HUGE bag full of cisplatin, kicking off round four of chemo on the same day that kicked off Opening Day for the Phillies, his beloved baseball team.

Actually, yesterday also marked the one-year anniversary of his "April Fool's" return home from Duke last year, during which he was able to relax in his own bed after 3 weeks at Duke. That nice rest lasted about 7 minutes before the medical rescue team was called by a nurse, after which six EMTs appeared in our home and hauled him out on a stretcher, and back to Duke for another week.

In a remarkable but unfortunate synchronicity, a medical rescue team answered a 911 call right in front of where we were sitting in chemo yesterday. A woman getting chemo had a heart attack, and the medics ran in, along with police, a doctor, and all the nurses, and rushed her out of chemo and over to the ER in the hospital. That poor woman. And she had no one sitting with her to comfort her. Prayers.

Anyway, we are hoping that perhaps in 2012, we will have an April 1st that does not involve life-saving maneuvers and calls to 911.

So about Bill...because Bill has had so many physical problems this past month, they did a lot more pre-medicating yesterday. Three hours of it, before they even got to the cisplatin. They gave him an anti-nausea medicine that will last five days (previously, he had taken it in pill form, and we had to pay (can't remember) either $60 or $90 PER PILL, and insurance wouldn't cover it.) But insurance does cover the drip form. Whew!

So because of all the helping medications he got, he feels normal right now. The downward spiral would normally begin on Sunday.

Sitting in a chemo clinic and listening to people tell their stories is like getting a doctoral degree in human suffering. Every time we're there, we hear people explain the toughest situations. Almost always, they tell their stories matter-of-factly, not in a self-pitying tone.

Yesterday, I heard a 35-year old man (who looks exactly like Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays Dexter and is on Six Feet Under) explaining that he had tonsil cancer. Yikes! And the radiation took away his ability to eat, so he has to feed himself with a squeeze tube into his stomach. He was asking a nurse to tell him in detail about a beef stew dinner she had cooked, as stew was his favorite food, and he missed it so much. He was also talking about all the things he likes to do when he's not sick, especially boating.

At the end of the day, he was telling his wife that there wasn't enough money in their account to pay for a whole dose of the medicine he needed, so she should use the credit card and buy just half.

What in the world do you do when you hear that? I wanted to walk over and say, No, you will buy ALL the medicine you need, and here is my credit card. But people have dignity, especially these Scots-Irish people in these mountains, and you can't just walk over and do that.

But in a world where a thing like that can happen, a young man can't buy the medicine he needs, something isn't right. At all.

The day ended on a more amusing, but equally strange, note when the man next to us started explaining to me how to kill yard moles by burying chewing gum with the foil on it. The moles eat the gum and die from the foil.

Ummmmmm, not sure I wanted to know that.

He finished his chat by telling me that if you break up pieces of alka seltzer and put them around your floorboards, mice will eat them and explode. He was then getting some distance into a description of how he had seen some guy feed alka seltzers to birds and the birds also exploded. "Them birds got bigger n bigger n then busted all to pieces an felled ratt down on the groun'."

Fortunately for the sake of what little was left of my mental health at that point, his wife stopped him right there, and told him to stop telling those stories.

And for whatever is left of YOUR mental health, I will now stop telling you about April 1st in the Chemo Palace.

At least it wasn't boring.

Love to all and thank you for caring.

Diamond Lil and Cowboy Billybob