#anyway not leaving for another 2 hours..... i should actually start mouthwashing >:)

[phagodyke]

fourth year running of my kaneda shotaro costume I havent even added a single patch to the jacket since I first made it even tho every year I say I'm going to. #lazynation

[justinsdaysinthedark]

Post #9 - Metotrex-HATE

August 20th: Life’s funny sometimes. When it’s going easy, you cruise through and enjoy all the good times. It’s easy. It’s like playing a video game on speed run. On the flip side, when life’s difficult, time slows down to a fraction of normal. You drag through hour by hour, looking for when some positivity will come.

My past week has been so incredibly tough. I never felt like a cancer patient before, but as bad as it is to say, I certainly do now.

I wrote in my last blog that “Day 10 is when things pick up again volume wise and from them until the finish, I'll basically be on a drip 24/7 and constantly have to be monitored - totally different to these first five days.” My god I couldn’t have been more correct.

Day 10 of my treatment started about 3:30pm on August 9th and was a 24hour chemo drug called Metotrexate. I was on this drip for 24 hours and I had no idea what it was going to do or how it was going to leave me. I do now!

This drug finished around 3:30pm on Saturday August 10th with the aim of it to kill my immune system and blood cells and leave me a walking corpse...and no surprise, that’s exactly what it did.

Last week, starting from as soon as the Metotrexate finished I was so incredibly sick. It’s hard to explain, but I’d definitely take the flu over what I just experienced...and I’m still not through the woods yet. The first few days weren’t too bad, I was simply tired with no energy. I slept during the day and night. I had no motivation to get up, move or do anything. So I didn’t. I slept.

The next few days things started to get worse and worse. Picture this, one day you’re perfectly normal with normal temperatures and heart rates. The next day, your temperature soars above 40 degrees and your heart rate is constantly sitting dangerously between 125-140BPM. This second part was me for the next few days. The scariest moment was last Wednesday when Courtney was here. I was sitting in the seat next to my bed, just sitting. Doing nothing. The nurse comes into do my observations and I start to sweat and feel weak. My heart rate is sitting at 145BPM, temperature at 40.3. I feel like i’m going to pass out, I actually think I do. The nurse demands Courtney to press the emergency button and everybody comes rushing in. This is what was my first of three Medical Emergency Calls (Medcall) for the 48 hour period. It was scary. Fortunately, my resident haematology doctor Adam was working late for whatever reason and took charge of the Medcall. Once I’d ‘come to’ slightly, Adam asked if I could move to my bed. It legitimately wouldn’t have been any more than a metre if that but it seemed like he’d asked me to run three in cricket - something we all know is never going to happen! I got up and staggered across and fell onto bed and by then, an announcement was on the loudspeaker.

“Medcall Adult, Monash Medical Centre. Ward 44. Haematology”

Before I knew it, I had 25 people in the room and was getting hooked up to an ECG machine. It truly was scary for me. Courtney was a trooper though. She stood in the corner and watched what was unfolding. In a way, I think we were both settled at the fact my resident doctor Adam lead it from start to finish. If he wasn’t there, who knows how we’d both have been.

It happened again another two times - both 7am and 7pm the next day. These two were far less scary because I knew what to expect.

At this stage, it’s Thursday August 15 and I am at the lowest of low. My mouth, throat and stomach are ravaged with ulcers. Something I don’t think I was ever going to avoid! I’m not hungry. I can’t eat due to these ulcers and drinking is near impossible.

I’m in incredible pain, all over. I have no immune system or anything to fight infection - which I was obviously getting with all my fevers. The pain team came around to see me and suggested I went on both Ketamine and Oxycodone to help with the pain. I was in no state to argue, so that I did. Boy oh boy did these give me two days of hallucinations though! Spiders climbing across the walls, people surrounding me talking when I slept; it was such a throw around.

All whilst this is happening, my hair is starting to fall out. Something I knew would eventually occur but never expected it to actually happen. It was bad. I was pulling chunks of hair out of my hair and beard. It was surreal. Alas, mum came in to cut my hair and Courtney brought in my razor to give it a shave. Both were tough tasks feeling so unwell, but we got there in the end.

Saturday August 17th around 2:30pm is when I started to pick up a little bit. I was able to sit up out of bed and try and entertain a conversation. Everyday since then has gotten better and better, albeit incredibly slowly. That puts us at today. I’m up out of bed, sitting next to my window writing a blog - something that was a world away a week ago! Only mum, dad and Courtney would understand as they have been there everyday through my lowest.

How am I today? I’d be lying if I said I were great however I’m the best I have been in a fortnight. I still have mouth ulcers and still struggle to swallow tablets and drink water. I expect this to go over the next two days - there’s just one ulcer at the back of my throat that is giving me grief. As a result, I’ve been taking a routine mouthwash three times a day to numb my mouth. The Peter Mac mouthwash, a cocaine based liquid followed by a lignocaine gel. Between these three, I’m able to ‘clean’ my mouth, numb the ulcers and make it bearable to either eat yoghurt and take my tablets - but trust me, it is still incredible tough.

Today marks Day 20 of my 16 Day treatment and as soon as my white blood cells return to a normal count, I’ll be allowed to go home for a few days before I start my next round of treatment next week. Apparently the white blood cells need to be 1-1.5 and mine were at 0.3 yesterday and 0.5 today. Hopefully, just hopefully my bone marrow kicks into gear over the next day or two and I’ll be home towards the end of the week - that’s the goal anyway! I’ve been hooked up to a drip 24/7 for the past 11 days and quite frankly, I’m over having a buddy to take everywhere. I can’t change my shirt so I’ve had to wear the same shirt for three or four days in a row. For those that know me, should know I love being clean. So that’s killed me. It’s also made showering hard, but no impossible. It just depends on my mood. I’ve been here 38 days straight and it’s just starting to get to me. What I’d do for a few days at home is a killer.

I spoke to my Doctor Adam yesterday who advised September 22nd was in the realms of possible for me to get to the fundraiser those closest to me are organising. A day that I’m really looking forward to and I just hope I can make it. Details are below.

That’s about it from me for now, hopefully this explains why I’ve been M.I.A for so bloody long. I have left out a lot of other details and touched over the basic stuff...so just trust me when I say this Chemotherapy and cancer business certainly isn’t easy! Until next time,

Much love.

Juzz xx

[cassiecantyousee]

Evacuation Nation

Exactly two weeks ago, I got in my car and drove out of the Florida Keys. It was a bizarre experience, and I’ll probably be processing it for a while, but I wanted to get at least some of my thoughts down before they become too hazy. So this is part diary entry, part reassuring everyone who has spent the last two weeks saying “oh my gosh don’t you live in the Keys are you okay?!?!”

So to start off: yes! I am okay! And I can now check “survived a hurricane” off my bucket list. Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what happened:

I went to bed on Sunday, September 3rd not really giving a second thought to Irma. The storm looked like it was going to head up the east coast, like Matthew had last year. And Matthew had barely affected the Keys at all; I had spent the evening Matthew “hit” painting and hanging out with friends. I assumed Irma would be more of the same. So I went to bed without a care in the world, and calmly drove to work Monday ready to start my week (yes, I worked on Labor Day. I take care of live animals, remember?).

The news that greeted my coworker and me when we booted up the computer that morning was…not great. Turned out Irma had shifted in the night, and was now headed straight for the Keys. It had also grown insanely huge, and was expected to reach Category 5 sooner rather than later. In case you aren’t familiar with the Keys, we’re a bunch of tiny rocky islands and anything higher than a Category 2 can be pretty devastating. That being said, hurricanes usually skirt around the Keys, either heading up the Atlantic coast or looping through the Gulf. We haven’t been hit by a major storm in a long time, but everyone still clearly remembered the damage from Wilma and Andrew. By noon Monday, it was pretty clear we were going to have to evacuate. I called my parents at lunch, reminded them I had a good car with brand new tires, and that I knew lots of people in Florida I could stay with. In the afternoon we started strategizing and prepping all the fish tanks, thinking that we would have another few days at least before we really had to leave. We also spent a lot of time refreshing spaghetti models and sort of laughing hysterically (hysterical laughter became a reoccurring theme throughout this whole process). I drove home at the end of the day, and started half-heartedly sorting through my clothes, telling myself I would really start making decisions on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning, we had a mandatory staff meeting. While I work in Key West, I live near the lab and the most recent models had Irma headed straight for us. And it was now EVEN BIGGER. There were talks of breaking records, and a few hyperbolic rumors of creating a new “Category 6” (these proved to be false, but not as far fetched as we might have hoped!). Priority one was making sure we all had a way to get out of the Keys, and somewhere to go once we reached the mainland. At the risk of getting too sappy, it was really heartwarming to see everyone I work with step right up to support each other. There were offers of rides and food and places to sleep, and before we knew it everyone had a plan. Then we moved into full on hurricane prep mode, and I drove down to Key West.

Probably the most surreal part of the whole thing was Tuesday morning at the Eco Center. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to give all the tanks their best possible chance of surviving through the storm. Meanwhile, we were still open, and tourists kept coming in and asking me for things like restaurant recommendations. Cue more hysterical laughter. At noon, we finally officially closed.

I spent the rest of the afternoon prepping the Eco Center and making phone calls and trying not to freak out. My coping mechanism of choice was blasting the new Kesha album (a coping mechanism I 100% recommend, because that album is incredible). My inner monologue went something like: “Where are the D batteries …yes, Mom, there’s gas in my car…I HOPE YOU’RE SOMEWHERE PRAAAAAAAYIN’…should I move the lionfish to the big tank or will it eat everybody…I HOPE YOUR SOUL IS CHAAAAAANGIN’…is that fish acting weird or am I acting weird.” And repeat. For hours. Then, I drove home.

Sorting through my stuff at my house is an experience I never want to repeat. I didn’t want to be paranoid, but reliable sources were forecasting a Category 5 storm headed directly for my house, and my house is ground level. It didn’t look good. So I had to decide what I wanted to load into my car, and what I wanted to leave behind. Most of my clothes quickly dropped in priority, as I realized that I seriously need a wardrobe overhaul. I’ve worked at field stations too long and most of my clothes are free souvenir t-shirts with paint on them. But all my books went straight into the back of my car, as well as some craft supplies and favorite wall art. Some of the books I didn’t even care about that much, but the idea of leaving them to be ravaged by a hurricane was so horrifying to me that I took them all anyway. Once everything was packed, I took a shower, put my betta fish in a gallon jug (really), and got in my car. I took a long look at my little blue house, trying to absorb it and prepare for the worst, but I’m not sure it really sunk in.

As I drove up the Keys I caught myself thinking things like, “Will that house still be there? Will I be able to go to that restaurant again? Will this bridge hold up?” Then I would snap myself out of it for a little while, and tell myself not to be so morbid. I’m a positive, happy person! What was wrong with me? But I didn’t want to miss appreciating the Keys as they were, just in case. It’s a strange line to walk, and I’m not sure I walked it well. So I talked to my parents, listened to music, and tried to think of it as a vacation. But the guilt at leaving all my critters behind was hard. I knew that I had given them the best chance, and that trying to move them would be worse for them than the storm, but I couldn’t help but feel that I abandoned them. Every time I passed any of the various and numerous animal centers in the Keys it was like a punch to the gut.

I spent Tuesday night with some wonderful friends in Boca, where we watched the news and laughed hysterically some more. Then the next morning I headed up to my aunt and uncle’s house in Orlando. By Wednesday afternoon, I was officially evacuated. As of Monday night, I hadn’t even planned on STARTING to evacuate until Thursday morning. Irma got serious real quick.

This is the part of the story where I start feeling guilty for a different reason: I had a really nice time in Orlando. I know a lot of people (most people even) had a very stressful time, and were couch surfing and staying in hotels, but I got an actual bed and got to hang out with family. I spent the week eating really good vegan food, watching documentaries, and reading books. We even went to a play! Then on Sunday morning, Irma hit the Keys.

I had already watched Irma pass over the Turks and Caicos, where I studied abroad, and that was hard enough. There was extensive damage, but thankfully no fatalities. At this point Irma had changed tracks a couple of times, so we weren’t entirely sure how directly the Keys were going to be hit. As it turned out, the eye of the storm passed directly over my house. That experience was surreal. After all the uncertainty, all the hopes, I had to sit on a couch in Orlando and watch one of the biggest storms in history go exactly where I hadn’t wanted it to go. I kept thinking of my little blue house, and how much I loved it, and how much we had all worked fixing it up over the last two years. I got weirdly focused on the fact that I had left my giant bottle of mouthwash in the bathroom cabinet (I just bought it! What a waste!). By Sunday evening, I was a mess. I was tired, stressed, and going a bit stir crazy. And Irma hadn’t even hit Orlando yet.

In the end, that may have worked in my favor. Irma was downgraded to a Category 2 by the time in reached Orlando, and at that point I was sort of done with emotions. I’d spent them all already. I was a little concerned about tornadoes, but honestly? I just wanted to go to bed. So if you were hoping for a vivid personal account of the actual storm, you’re out of luck. I essentially said “Only a Category 2? Whatever.” and passed out (after more hysterical laughter, of course). Seriously, I slept through the whole thing. Apparently a tornado touched down about four miles north of me, but I didn’t even know that happened until days later. We lost power, and had some downed tree debris, but the whole neighborhood got together to help clean it up. It was actually kind of nice. Plus, my uncle had bought an inverter for his electric car, so we had power without having to worry about a generator. We could power the fridge, fans, charge any and all electronic devices, and even set up a wireless hotspot to get online. We had a pretty sweet setup.

The rest, you probably know. There was widespread devastation in the Keys, and they closed the whole county. I ended up flying north to see my parents (and reassure them that I was alive!), waiting for things to reopen. I’ve been watching everything secondhand, just like everybody else. I will say that social media has been HUGELY helpful in all of this. Those safety check-ins helped me sleep at night.

Miraculously, my house seems to have escaped serious damage. I’ll finally get back to the Keys Thursday morning, and I know seeing the destruction first hand is going to be hard (even through there has already been a lot of recovery!). I may write another post once I see everything for myself, but for now, know that I am safe and well. I still have a place to live (even if it currently doesn’t have any power or running water!), and I’m headed back to work.

Stay safe everyone, and think about donating to various recovery funds. Especially Caribbean islands getting hit again by hurricane Maria.

[rueur]

Morning Pages No. 57

Thursday 20th August - 9:27am

I’ve done everything I need to do for the morning, except eaten but I’m not too fussed about that. I used mouthwash, and I’m feeling pretty clean. Popped a pimple. I have work at 2:30pm, and I’m looking forward to it because I get to leave the house, and I know it’s going to be an easy shift. I kinda still want to watch Indiana Jones, but I also want to play a little Pokemon, and maybe I also want to be productive, because I’ve spent the last few days being really, really productive and it feels weird to actually have ‘free time’ now, but I also deserve some free time. I’ve been working too hard.

I had a phone call with Sarah last night. That went for about an hour. I took it outside with my headphones on, like just sitting on the side of the house by the carport with Lonzo’s red saddle jumper draped across my knees, as I stitch up that velcro patch that’s been coming off. I managed to do one entire side of the patch, so there’s just the other long side and then the short top that’s left. I’m keen to do that today. Or I can bring it to work and do it at work, but I feel like that may be a slap in the face for my managers, I don’t know. It’s true that we just don’t have a lot to do at work right now, so it would make sense to just bring things in, but at the same time, I have so much time at home. I shouldn’t be bringing chores into work. They don’t know that I actually don’t have that much time at home.

Sarah’s been having a weird couple of months with Rishi, so we chatted about everything and she was asking me what she should do in order to get their relationship to a place where talking about sensitive issues comes with more stable terrain, or more familiar territory. I spoke to her about the past three years with Evan, and the necessity to lay a groundwork on how you handle arguments. Sometimes it can feel like when you’re fighting, you fight in different ways and need different things from each other in order to attain closure. But when you need different things at the same time that neither of you are able to give, it can feel in that moment like you’re just totally incompatible. Evan and I have had our fair share of those fights, where he doesn’t want to say anything either because he doesn’t entirely know what to say in order to accurately express how he feels, or he simply doesn’t want to say anything out of concern that it’ll make things worse or just upset me further. But then because I’m full of nervous energy most of the time, and because I need to hear communication from him, him being stoic and speechless usually ends up just making me upset anyway. And it’s curious, but it was only during my conversation with Sarah that I realised that Evan and I haven’t had an argument like that in a long time now, like an argument that’s filled with awkward, tense, silent pauses because neither of us wants to speak. It’s actually a lot easier for us to hash things out now because Evan expresses himself more efficiently now. And I think it’s just because we’ve been together long enough at this point to understand how to speak to one another, and how to attain closure by working together to address our grievances. It only took like three years and one minor break-up to get to this point, but now I mean...we’re strong. We don’t have any doubts about one another, and about our equal commitment to this relationship. It’s nice, actually, to be in a space where for the first time, my partner is equally committed to me as I am to them. It’s really nice. And Sarah deserves that too.

I think a major contributing factor is that Rishi’s our age, he’s younger. Like Ashwin, but Ashwin also has a job and has somewhat of a direction he knows he may like to follow, with being the practice manager. But Rishi’s unemployed, he has no streams of personal income aside from his parents, and a business that’s just not moving fast enough yet for him to be profiting off of it. And Sarah also said he may be spending on overheads prematurely, like a warehouse space and an EMPLOYEE. The boy is living boldly. I mean I understand that though, it can be tricky being an entrepreneur and not having any real groundwork to follow when it comes to plotting out your career trajectory. ‘Entrepreneurship’ is just stabs in the dark until you find something remotely similar to what you’re looking for, and then just making it work from there. One of the articles I had to write for this month was on why you don’t need a lot of capital to start your own business. One of the major points made by other entrepreneurs is that if your idea can’t make money unless you have $10,000 or something, then your idea probably isn’t as strong as it could be. Some people say they need money for marketing, like in order to get their product out there...but then at the same time, you have a lot of online businesses that get their start from just playing the social media game really, really well. You don’t necessarily need to pay Facebook or Instagram for a promoted platform or anything like that, not if your product is good enough and fills enough of the gap in the market that you’ve sussed out.

Whenever I think of the phrase ‘gap in the market’, I think of people patching up water pipes and shit with duct tape, like just the most haphazard pipe in the world that’s filled with duct tape patches of all shapes and sizes. That’s what ‘the market’ looks like to me. People like to pretend that civilisation is orderly, completely organised to the point where the world exists off of squares and grids, linear systems. I know that’s not the case now, especially since lockdown, but I knew it during my undergrad too. You can just see the cracks more readily now, and you can see the desperation of the bodies that govern us - be they governmental or corporate - as they try to ‘keep the economy afloat’ like it’s the only thing that matters. I know it’s also easy for me to talk because I still have a job, but for the past few years I’ve had the bare minimum of a job. Twelve contracted hours a week, it’s usually lucky for me to make $400. And now that there’s no commissions it’s lower than that. The way that I see my job is that it only really covers rent, and if I want to support the rest of my life, I’ll absolutely need to take on students and have as many SEO jobs as I can hold.

Anyway, Sarah and I chatted about a lot of things, but mostly it was about Rishi and what she should do. She also told me she’d been asking Amy for advice and Amy’s response to Sarah’s qualms have been a little bit more defensive or protective, I should say. It’s because of everything that had happened with Sonny. Also it doesn’t help that apparently both Rishi and Sonny are scorpios, and Amy’s doubly wary for that reason too! Evan and I were talking about how much we enjoy being pisceans, and the more I think about it right now, the more I realise that I actually do love being around other pisceans. I feel like I just get their energy, their nature, and I know what to expect from them because it’s all me too. Amy’s also a piscean, which is just the most fitting thing ever. Our emotional intuition is off the charts, and I’m yet to meet a person who’s as in tune with themselves as Amy is. 

It’s 9:50am, and I feel like I’m making good time with these pages this time around. I struggled through yesterday’s, and I think it’s because I knew I just had a mound of work waiting for me once I’d typed out these pages. But I know that all I need to do for the rest of today is just chill out and wait for it to be 2pm, when we’ll leave so I can make it to work! It’s going to be an easy day. If anything, all I should task myself with today is organising both the zoom chat with Steve and the zoom chat with Dan. That sounds like a perfectly fine workload. I’m just not sure when I’ll be able to organise either of those chats. I feel like I should prioritise Steve, just because I haven’t dedicated much time to Julie’s project because of the agency this week, but I did tell Julie ahead of time, so I’m not feeling badly right now. Also, Dan’s still getting stuff together, so it’s going to be a pretty preliminary conversation. Even so, I should get in touch with both of them today.

I feel like I need to go to the bathroom again. Second poop! Oh second poop, how long must you plague me for? How do I absorb you into my first poop? Or am I just always doomed to feel the nagging pains of second poop on every commute for years and years to come? I kind of regret writing this out...but hey, it’s my stream of consciousness. Penny!

Yesterday’s 21 Days challenge was to interact with our Abundance Accountability Buddy (AAB), and mine is a woman named Penny. Nichole and Amy were paired together, and Evan has both Braden AND Anthony, so initially I felt a little iffy about being paired with a complete stranger, but at this point I just trust Sarah and I believe she paired Penny and I together for a reason that I’ll come to know through interacting with this person. I’m hopeful that our chats turn familiar and we share some pretty nifty insights with one another. And that maybe I’ll make a friend? I’m not entirely sure how old Penny is. I had a look through her profile pictures out of curiosity, and there are two women in a lot of them: one older, one younger. At this point, Penny might either be the mother or the daughter, I don’t know! I mean, I know it doesn’t matter too much, but I just don’t know how to handle the text speech. I feel like I text differently when it comes to people from different age brackets or different personal backgrounds, I don’t know! But I trust Sarah! She paired us together consciously, for a genuine reason. And I will talk to Penny and only through talking to Penny, will we both come to realise what that reason is. I mean at the same time, it may have also been completely random. 

It’s a beautiful day, as I can see it out of my big front window. I’m honestly digging the long grass in the front yard, even though I know it cannot be encouraged. Maybe I’ll ask Evan to mow it at some point today. Or we can do it together tomorrow. There are some dog poops that I could pick up, and I could work on clearing the garden beds at the very least. I’m still keen to plant some lavender and rosemary along the house. It’ll complement the house’s muted colour scheme really nicely. Interesting...with a greater number of paragraphs, my word count for these pages has gone from an average of around 2100, to now 1993. I should write more paragraphs. 2000.