I've Got One Hand In My Pocket, And The Other One's Taking Chemo...

So I'm sitting in a hospital bed getting ready for some Chemo... it's a pretty strange and very surreal feeling, but anyway the hourly live updates probably won't be happening because I'll be receiving high dose Benadryl in about a minute here and it will most likely knock me out. Just to give a couple of updates.... I originally thought that I'd be getting treatment every 3 weeks, but my spleen decided to go ahead and be extra Cancery so I'm going to have to get treatment every two weeks. Also, some heart tests they did on me came back with a possible problem. I may not have enough blood being pumped out of my heart, so I have to have more tests to see if that's something to be concerned with or not. There's a thought that it could just be due to an inaccurate test machine. I thought that maybe a piece of sausage was stuck in a valve, but no luck. So, as for Chemo... you don't actually get called in to receive it for at least an hour after your appointment time. After that you get an IV with saline, two anti-nausea drips, you take 2 Tylenol, 1 Anti-Nausea pill, and a bag of Benadryl. The first 3 types of Chemo will take a total of 45 minutes, the last drug, Rituxin, will take about 6 hours. Outside of of hearing I might have a heart problem, I was most surprised at how many pills I'll have to take each day. AND I've never been in a place where they care about constipation so much. Everyone here keeps saying that I need to "move my bowels" everyday. The last drug will be Predisone which is a steroid and I'll be getting a very very high dose of it, there's usually a feeling to Euphoria associated with it... can't wait for that. One of the drugs I'll have to take after treatment is a needle of Neulasta to help my blood cell count, and I may have to administer it myself. I'll film that if I do. I'll write more in the next couple of days, I'm pretty tired from the Benadryl. Thanks everyone for the well wishes, they mean the world.

So, I went to a Sperm Bank.....

Yes, you read that correctly. Chemo has a slight chance of permanently taking away my baby makers, so I had to go to a sperm bank. I normally wouldn't write about something like that since it's really weird and I have relatives that read this blog, so I have no plans of getting to detailed if you know what I mean. You can find that entry at www.feedthegeese.com (just kidding, I have no clue if that website exists). Anyway, I had to go in to NYC for the "deposit" and didn't really know what to expect. My only reference was the movie "Road Trip" where the guy that plays Stifler gets brought in to a room by a hot nurse. This couldn't have been more different from that. The place I went to was a very small office with a waiting room (which was empty) and a secretary sitting at the desk. If you ever want to feel uncomfortable, just go sit in the silence of a waiting room at a sperm bank where a young lady is sitting at the reception desk. I asked her if she felt as uncomfortable as I do and she said she didn't, but unless she was in the porn industry I'd imagine it would be tough not to feel uncomfortable. Eventually a doctor enters the waiting room and gives you the low down as far as what testing goes on, the storage of everything, and some pricing. After that, the doctor walks you to a room and show's you where everything is. The doctor closes the door and there you are, all alone, with only one thing to do. To answer the most obvious question, yes there are magazines and DVD's and a plastic cup sitting on a table. I took the first 5-10 minutes just taking everything in and giggling. There are DVD's for every "taste" with the exception of Gay Porn. There's a chair that slightly reclines and a protective covering over it. The weirdest part was probably the fact that you can hear the secretary shuffling her papers and talking on the phone while you're in the room. That completely took away the option of putting on a DVD. I completed my mission. After walking out of the room the secretary's desk is right in front of you and she just looked up at me. I wasn't sure what to do so I asked her if I was supposed to smoke a cigarette. She kind of laughed, but not too much. I paid the bill and she said I should call the next day. I asked if that was so the the plastic cup didn't think I just used it for the night and don't plan on calling even though I said I would. She laughed a little more, but still not a lot. She's probably heard every joke possible about that situation anyway. So, that was it, that's what it's like. It's very uncomfortable, unromantic, and to the point. In an update since my last blog posting, my people finally received an answer from my cancer's people regarding my offering of becoming fat on my own instead of cancer/chemo doing it. Their response came in the form of an envelope and in that envelope was only one thing. A cut out of Telly Savalas' head crudely taped to the body of Dom Deluise... Touche Lymphoma, Touche.