Wishful thinking and reality, sometimes its hard

to tell one from the other, that can be a good

thing. Sometimes its all to clear that reality isn't

always based on wishes, that can be bad.

The reality is that each treatment leaves me nauseous, drained, weary to a greater extent. There's a dead chemical taste in my mouth and a vague sense of dizziness that only seems to leave as the next treatment is due. My hair begins to fall out easily, my white blood cells dwindle away.

My second treatment in my right arm began to cause pain and damage my veins, so they switched to my left for the third. Much less willing to put up with it, my left arm hurt at once. The pain increased daily until it felt like broken glass was being pushed through the veins of an already beaten arm. On the thursday before my fourth chemotherapy treatment I went into surgery again, this time to have a port implanted in my chest. This port bypasses my arms, lies under the skin of my chest, and a catheter leads from it to feed the chemicals directly to an artery into my heart to be pumped into my body. Isn't it weird to poison a body in the hopes that what you want to kill is weaker than what you want to save and will die just in time to to let the other live?

So there's my dose of reality for you. Now I'm halfway though chemotherapy.

The last two weeks were hard. I am so grateful for the companionship that got me through it, that allowed the best part of wishful thinking to be a bit more of my reality.

Scott