Dec 16 2008
CLL: Cycle Number Four
At least it is predictable: a short, one-hour infusion of Treanda and whatever pharmaceutical condiments they give him on the side. My partner with CLL (in Spanish, we heard on a telephone conference call, it is “say-ellay-ellay”) will feel well enough to drive himself to and from the hospital. He gets home looking fine, all shaved and bathed. However, half an hour later the misery begins.
We have a routine now that we know how it works. Suddenly, he announces, “I don’t feel good.” As he steels himself against fainting or collapsing in a dizzy, exhausted heap, I get him to the living room couch. He takes a pill and is semi-coherent: “Is it cold in here?” I reply “no,” but I pile on the blankets. His hands and shoulders shake. Then it feels like a lifetime of watching and waiting. Funny, that, because “watch and wait” is a CLL term of art. It’s what patients do when their white blood count numbers are not so great, but they don’t have extremely uncomfortable symptoms.
I tiptoe around and check on him every half hour. For now, he is sleeping very deeply. That is a blessing, because for the rest of the month following these two days of chemo, he has great difficulty sleeping. As he saws wood with his snores, he tosses off the blankets or pulls them back up. After a couple of hours, his skin becomes the burning hot that I expect. His color is white, yellow and purple, too.
I carefully remove the back cushions to make more room for him on the sofa, now that it seems he will stay there through the night. As I gaze at him, I wonder how much of the scene could be the same one his mother watched when he was three or four years old. Sleeping peacefully. Hands clutching the blanket. Will Shakespeare knew what he was talking about in As You Like It and the seven ages of man. My partner has passed the apex of the parabola and is now repeating stages in reverse order.
Soon, I will go to bed - to sleep, perchance to dream of pre-apex, pre-CLL days.
