Well, here we are again. It’s time for an update. 

I wish it were mostly good news.

The last time I wrote about myself and what was going on, I had a rather scathing but fun time venting out my frustration with a very long and debilitating day at the hospital. This time around, the stress is not about anything or anyone within the walls of MSK. Today, on the day of my Chemotherapy, everyone has been super kind and things are running as smooth as possible.Fingers crossed it continues.

For the last two weeks, my fiancée and I have been battling my body. Every day, it feels as if various symptoms or moments of weakness pop up every few hours.

I have had a battle with the bin (nausea/vomit attacks) at least once a day for the last eight days. Over the previous two days, I have had one after any principal meal I’ve attempted to eat. The only food that has been safe for me to eat over the last week has been rice, and I have had to guzzle down A LOT of it because, over the course of the previous two weeks, my digestive tract has been all out of whack. Has everyone heard of BRAT; Banana, Rice, Applesauce, Toast? We all know what those four things combat, right?

Perhaps that’s too much information? Ah, who cares. This is what it is.

My fiancée and I have been going back and forth with various nurses about what to do to try to control these unkind and unpleasant bodily functions. As much as the advice of medical professionals can help, the fact of the matter is that a lot of it is on me. My oncologist was on vacation for a week and (serendipitously) returned to the office on the day I wrote this.

I now know when I am about to get a nasty bit of nausea. First comes a bit of stomach discomfort, followed by food particles working their way up my throat and back into my mouth. I know, it’s fucking gross.

This results in some spitting, but more annoyingly, a constant feeling that something is in my throat. How would I describe it? Rather unceremoniously as a hangnail hanging out in my throat. It’s as if there is a mud flap of food that persistently sticks around until my body decides it’s time to eradicate it violently.

And how do I know precisely when that is? My body temperature juts up about 100 degrees, and then, within three minutes, I am incapacitated.

A glorious experience. A magnificent time. 

It is rather sad that I have grown somewhat accustomed to how to handle this. The fact it is happening every day now, with or without preventative medication that is meant to help, is frustrating, to say the least. 

The other day, I attempted to run errands with Emma…just get outside and be a passenger in the car while she runs in and out of various stores. Literally five minutes into the ride, I began feeling all the precursors, and I had to beg Emma to get home. We pulled into the driveway, I opened the door, and the attack began.

Thank god I didn’t get anything in her car. She literally just had it detailed. I wish I was kidding, but she had picked it up from the car wash not two hours before this failed expedition.

I can’t praise Emma enough for how much of a rockstar she has been throughout this whole thing. Being a teacher, she is now on her summer vacation, so she has been with me nearly every day. That means she has had to deal with the constant ups and downs that my body has been putting me through. Emma has had to react in a flash when I begin begging, “BIN, BIN.” Emma has had to be the slow, cold, massaging hand on my neck when my body needs a relaxing cooldown. 

It is fucking exhausting. Mentally and physically.

The past two weeks have been stress-inducing for Emma and me, not just because my body is regressing a bit in terms of reaction to treatment and energy capabilities but also because our wedding is VERY quickly approaching. As of my writing this, we are eight days away from tying the knot. I still remember when our countdown was over 300 days away. It’s almost as if a ton of shit has happened over the past two months that has made time even more malleable.

As part of our final preparations for the big day, we have had final meetings with the venue, photographer, videographer, and everyone in between. These phone calls are exciting because Emma and I are that much closer to being officially together forever, but I would be lying if I wasn’t getting more nervous with every passing day.

And do not get me wrong, it has nothing to do with nerves about marriage.

Perhaps I should be writing my vows now instead of this blog post, but I’ve got the general blueprint in my head. We will be fine. I digress.

The nerves stem from how my body is going to act on Thursday, July 4th, and Friday, July 5th. 

Will I get through a wedding rehearsal, a rehearsal gathering, and a rehearsal dinner the day before our wedding? That is a lot of standing, talking, and being around people, all of which are things that I am remarkably uncomfortable with right now.

And then there is the day of the wedding. The natural stress of the day will be something I have to work through, but what about the bathroom or nausea attacks? I am already a nervous bathroom user, so that isn’t good. I know I need to eat on my wedding day, but the last thing I want to do is have to vacate whatever premises to go and be intimate with a bin and nausea medication. 

Will this latest Chemotherapy treatment have the same long-lasting side effects, or will my body adapt better?

My body is a question that I can not answer right now. My mind is ready to get married. My mind is ready to call Emma my wife. My mind wants to celebrate with everyone around me.

But my body. What will my body do?

The honest answer is, who the fuck knows. We just need a positive outlook and hope it is ready for a bounce back. All I need is two days. Give me two days. Give me 48 hours of manageable physical symptoms.

Do wedding tears act like tears from the phoenix in Harry Potter? Can they heal everything? If that is the case, I will be totally fine because I am going to be bawling my eyes out. Nobody is ready for the amount of tears they are about to see out of the groom.

In what can be called practice, there has been plenty of activity in my tear ducts over the last few weeks. I would be lying if I said that I am doing great mentally while my body seemingly slips a bit from the previous weeks.

I returned to therapy and had my first in-person session in over three years. I started crying before I even got a word out to my therapist. 

Before reaching out and getting the appointment, my parents and I had one of our more intense conversations…ever? They were saying I needed help, which is shocking because they were never the most understanding about mental health problems. I appreciate this growth from my parents, but I couldn’t help but feel an innate sense of frustration. 

Going to therapy, in person, to a therapist who knows more about me than any human alive, is scary enough. Going in after not seeing him for six months and having to trauma dump the fact I have cancer and everything that’s come with it…well, that just didn’t seem like a good time. 

My parents and Emma were absolutely right in saying I needed help. Hell, I know I needed it. But I felt shame. I felt anger. I felt frustrated.

I don’t like asking for help; that has already been established. Asking to have someone listen to me cry, vent, and be emotionally vulnerable for an hour at a time is not something I am comfortable doing. And asking after six months of nothing is even worse.

But I did it. I went. 

And I am going to go again.

Therapy does help, but it’s not a fix-all. There are still massive moments of weakness.

Last night, nearly every member of the REEEEEEM came over The Mansion. It was a mini-college reunion. This is an occurrence as rare as an eclipse, often only happening at weddings. Steve organized it all again, like the Memorial Day spontaneous bash, and I am eternally grateful for that.

Unfortunately, just a couple hours into everyone being there, my body decided it was CANCER TIME. My stomach started to hurt, my temperature began to rise, and I felt what was coming. I had to text Emma that I needed the bin, and after a stress stop in the bathroom, I had to lock myself in the bedroom for the inevitable.

After the nausea spell, I was physically wiped out, and emotionally, I was even worse. This is precisely what I didn’t want to happen. I don’t want my friends to see me like this, yet my body decided it was time to expel some fluidy demons. It shouldn’t have been so hard, but after being absent from the living room for 45 minutes, I had to go out there and say I was down for the night. I had to say goodbye to my friends in my own home.

The thought came running through my head. Is this going to happen at my wedding?

I was in pain and physically exhausted. It was the right move logically because I needed rest, and I had to get up at the crack ass of dawn this morning because of my morning lab work and Chemo appointments. Objectively, I did the right thing, but emotionally it just felt wrong. It is not what I wanted to do, but it is what I needed to do. I had to be vulnerable to the moment and fuck if that isn’t the most humbling thing in the world.

And a credit to my friends. The effort to come over, for even a short few hours, will not be forgotten. They totally understood when I had to call it a night. I knew that they would. But still. It was really hard for me to do.

Did I go to sleep soon after? Oh, absolutely not.

All I could think of was one question: what if this happens at my wedding?

I landed on one answer.

It doesn’t matter. 

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if I had a stomach attack at my wedding. It doesn’t matter if I have to use the bathroom frequently on our matrimony day. The only thing that matters is that by 5 PM, I am going to be officially married to the love of my life, and that’s pretty fucking special. Sure, there’s the first dance, the reading of our own vows, the mother-son dance, and many more small things, but in the end, the only thing that matters is that I am going to be able to call Emma my wife.

That is the way I have to think of it. That is the way I need to approach it. Body be damned, this is a mind-over-matter ordeal. I have got to be mentally strong, not just for me, but for Emma, because she will be my wife.

Stanko Update #1 (May 10, 2024) – “I Have Cancer”
Stanko Update #2 (May 30, 2024) – “Perspective And Medical Yo-Yo’ing”
Stanko Update #3 (June 13, 2024) – “Thursday, June 13th Was A Dreadful, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”

Stanko Excel Lists | Movies, Books, Podcasts. TV Shows
Stanko Letterdbox Account

RECENTLY WATCHED

Posted on 0 By jstanko99 General Topics Posted in General Topics Tagged #, , , , ,

jstanko99

Leave a comment