Time & Space

Room #5, but currently no roommate. I've been so lucky! The difference of not having a roommate is amazing. My anxiety level is at like, a 6/10 instead of at a constant 10/10. It makes it so much easier to BREATHE.

I'm sure I'll get one by tomorrow (it's been 2 days now), but I've been enjoying the silence and the space in the meantime. Very grateful for that. 

On the other hand, I still don't know how to make it through another whole week here. I feel so demotivated. I hate not having any idea at all WTF the next couple of months will bring.

Just thinking

One of the reasons I use this blog is to keep my social media clear of cancer talk, but seeing as I use Facebook to pour out my daily thoughts, and keep me entertained while I'm stuck in the hospital with not much to do, I end up talking about cancer a lot anyway. Or I at least end up talking about the hospital. It's all that's going on in my life right now, so it's kind of hard not to.

I hate not knowing the future. I hate not knowing what's going to happen. I remember that feeling from last time. I have no idea what's going to happen next--will they find my a donor? How long will it take them? What if they don't find one? How much consolidation chemo will I need? Am I going to die?

Patience (not patients!)

This place is REALLY teaching me patience (and I noticed the pun only when I wrote the subject line of the post, ha!).

Long story short, we're stuffed 2 to a room, and very close together. No matter how well you get along with your roommate, you're bound to drive each other crazy after awhile.
Which is definitely my case right now.

My roommate (who is otherwise quite nice) has tons of visitors every day, and is on her cellphone for hours at a time. starting 8am. (Once she was on at 6:30am.) She gets REALLY into her conversations and is super loud. And she's just a few feet away from my bed...we're only separated by a mere curtain. (As I keep writing on social media, this is a sardine hospital!)
I just can't take it anymore, I am so sick of hearing her voice all day long. I was blasting music on my earphones to try to block is out, but after doing that for a week, and removing the earbuds at one point and hearing how damn LOUD it was, I decided to give my poor ears a break and just listen to music/watch movies on my laptop without the earphones.
But her nurse insists I listen to stuff with earphones...never mind the fact that she cackles on her cell phone starting at 8 am and has entire family gatherings in here daily, and I never make a peep.
But if she wants to sleep in the afternoon, I gotta use earphones again (because fuck my ears, apparently) so she can sleep. (Hmmm, when she starts up at 8am I'd like to sleep a bit more too, but you don't hear me complaining!)

It's just all so exhausting. Such is the nature of being stuffed 2 to a room with barely any space to move around. I'm just so fucking tired of hearing her voice. I can't explain how tired of her voice I am. I'm already stressed out about, ya know, CANCER, and the transplant, and finding the donor and all that (as everyone in this ward is), and then we add this really undesirable (understatement) rooming situation to the mix, and ugh...what a disaster.

Food!

I am soooo grateful that I am not nauseous anymore and that I have my appetite back, and that I’m eating normally again.

But!

The food service here......oh man.

They have you fill out a menu every morning so you can choose what you want to eat.
They’ve gotten my meals wrong 7 times so far (twice today).
I mean, what’s the point?

Neti pot syringes

I'm not allowed to blow my nose (because my platelets are low, so if there's blood, it'll keep bleeding...) so my nurses are giving me little saline pushers (like "syringes" kind of) to stick up my nose and squirt with saline. It's hilarious, but it works to relieve the pressure in my head! Like one of the nurses said, it's like a netti pot...which is, by the way, something I had never heard of before facebook. But since facebook, I've seen it everywhere. So odd.

I had another CT scan today. I hate going for those, because transport can take awhile (they bring you via wheelchair) and it's cold downstairs. FWIW, so far they've been quicker than the Royal Vic, which makes sense, seeing as the Royal Vic was a huge hospital for many different things, whereas the Princess Margaret is strictly a cancer hospital, and it's NOWHERE as big. I mean, the Royal Victoria...man, that place was huge! It was like a castle.

I have a lot to say but I don't know where to start, so I'll just end this here for now.

Clarification

Add-on to my last post: I re-read my last post and it's a bit unclear, so I'm adding this! :P

Of course, I am happy that I am already happy with my life the way it is. I am happy to not have any real regrets. Not everyone is so lucky. (Welllll, maybe "lucky" isn't the right word to use, because some--obviously not all, but SOME--people have regrets out of their own doing, be it sheer laziness or foolishness. But not everyone, of course!)
Anyway, I don't want to come off as "boo, I can't travel, everything sucks!", or as acting unhappy because *travel* is the one thing I can't have. 
The point of the post was the money thing....so many people still insist money cant buy you happiness, and I wanted to point out one of the very many ways that it can, by talking about the one & only thing that I would change about my life. The only thing that I want to change about my life...but I can't....because it costs money.
But if I had money, I would do it, and it would bring me much happiness. 

That being said, while I'm not complaining that I can't afford to travel in general, I AM complaining about the fact that I can't go to Dubai, specifically. That trip was yeaaaars in the making. I can't believe how close I was to finally going. I mean, the plane tickets were bought & everything. I sure hope we can get our tickets refunded. (That's actually something we're working on right now, but that's another rant for another day.)

Does that make sense?

Or maybe my original post already made sense to begin with. Haha, who knows! My brain is so fuzzy these days.

All the happiness money can buy me

When I was hospitalized with leukemia the first time, and things were looking really really really bad, and I was wondering if I would even make it through that summer, I didn’t have any real regrets about anything in my life because in general, if I want to do something, I just do it. I thought to myself “what will I do differently if I survive this?” And then thought “nothing really, because I’m happy with my life the way it is. I just wish I could travel more.” (Yeahhh there was that whole thing about prioritizing alone time, but I'm talking about BIG GOALS here.)

Except travelling is not something you can just ...go do. It takes time to save up enough money to be able to afford to travel. Especially because of the UTTERLY INSANE DEBT I incurred due to being in the hospital for most of 2013—that took years to pay off. So yeah, no traveling for awhile. But all these years later I finally paid off my debts and I was finally ready to travel (for vacation) again. And not just anywhere, but to Dubai. Dubai! A trip that took years and YEARS of planning.

Mike and I first discussed going 10 years ago. 5 years ago, one of my oldest & dearest friends moved there, but we still couldn’t just pick up and go visit her because we couldn’t afford it. Fiiiiiinally, at the end of 2018, 10 years of hard work had paid off, and I had paid off all my debts so that I was ready to go, and tickets were bought...and then this shit happens.

No Dubai. No travelling anywhere. Just sitting in the damn hospital. 

Thankfully I’ve taken some small trips during remission, when I’ve visited Mike while he was on tour (but I didn’t have to pay for most of that, thankfully—otherwise I never would have been able to have gone). He was working for most of those trips, of course--but! We got in a trip to Miami together, and that was honestly one of the best trips I've ever taken in my life. 

Travelling is expensive. Travelling requires money. Travel is the only thing that I feel is missing from my life right now. (Uhh...other than the current situation of my fucked-up bone marrow needing to be repaired asap, of course!)

Anyway, I dunno. If you’ve made it this far—if you’ve read all this and still firmly believe “money doesn’t buy happiness!”, then I give up. I also don’t think you really know what it’s like to really, really want something—or to be without money for so long. 

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger (it can!)

A lot of people pass around a meme on social media that says something along the lines of "What didn't kill me didn't make stronger. It gave unhealthy coping mechanisms and a dark sense of humour, but it didn't make me stronger."

Now sure, it's funny, but I often find the exact opposite to be true. When I go through something awful, I usually learn a thing or two, whether it's a different way to look at certain situations, or new skills I can use in some way.

Battling cancer the first time definitely made me stronger. I'm generally not as scared this time--at least not right now! My primary emotion if anger. When the doctor told me I had relapsed, my response was to sigh, swear, and then snicker. Because it was just so absurd to me.

I mean, sure, I'm scared, and sometimes I'll get bouts of absolute terror. But I mostly can't help but take a "been there, done that" attitude to the whole thing, which makes it so much less scary than the last time, when I had no idea what was going on. Fear of the unknown sucks. So does the reality of the not-so-great prognosis of leukemia in general, but that's another discussion for another time.
So yeah, I'm scared, but mostly I'm just disappointed and sad, and above all, so incredibly angry. The anger outweighs the fear.

My life was going so well--settling down with my husband in a new city that I absolutely adore, both of us finally IN our careers, and finally having paid all off my debts--and then blam, this happens. A big giant train crash in the middle of my lifeline.

And I know once I get to the transplant stage, I'm probably going to get really scared all over again. Because the transplant is something new, and because so many things could go wrong with it, too. Also, there's not all that much of a plan C after that. So let's hope this goes well!

Relapse!

Yay, my cancer's back.

I guess if those asshole leukemic cells can be revived, so can this blog.

I think it's best I do that, so I don't constantly litter my social media (or Facebook anyway) with my cancer bitching. Ha ha ha!

I'm gonna need a bone marrow transplant this time. Ahhhhh, cancer, I'm so bored of you.