As I shuffled back from the bathroom to the room where I was being prepped for embolization, I heard my friend/former freelancer/catgodmother tell the nurse, “She means a lot to a lot of people, this one.”
A year ago, I remember crying in the same room as the doctors re-placed my MediPort after a blood infection. I’d felt abandoned, despite being surrounded by people. I burst into tears when they asked me who was picking me up. My new healthcare proxy picked me up that day, and she was there after this procedure too. We’d forgotten who I’d named my healthcare proxy, and I’d narrowed it down to three people. “I’ll use that to get in,” she said, adding she’d thought about telling the doctors she was my domestic partner or fiancee. But that position had already been taken. “I told everyone I was your fiancee,” whispered my boyfriend after I woke up from my procedure. “I didn’t know if they would let me in otherwise.”
From now on, I encourage everyone who visits to claim to be my fiancee and leave the hospital staff wondering.
I feel so different from a year ago. I had been surrounded by good people then too, but I had been alienated from the good for awhile.
I wish I didn’t feel so physically terrible. I’m back pretty much to where I was the January before last and the ensuing months, when I needed daily fluids. On Tuesday, I spent the night at urgent care for low electrolytes. I had been trying to wait until my IV fluids, but my heart had felt funny, and I was more lightheaded than usual, and I didn’t want to die at my desk, because not that many people sit around me and no one might notice until the web requests started piling up, unanswered.
On Monday, I got a call that I was slated for my last PRRT dose. (Through a spectacular misunderstanding on my part, I didn’t get it weeks ago, as I’d hoped. I also had to wait for insurance approval, which takes weeks.) “All I have to do is get through the next week,” I thought. It’s proven to be more difficult than I thought.
I also need to keep my platelets up, and they dropped after this embolization. The hope is that the embolization would relieve some of my symptoms, but so far, I feel worse. Part of it is because of post-embolization syndrome, which causes nausea and fatigue, and the other part is because I am on post-embolization antibiotics. Antibiotics tend to make me pretty sick, and I had to go to urgent care in November after a few doses.
If I can’t get the PRRT, then it’s just my time to go. I have to sign some legal paperwork on Monday and publish some calendar events for work and wrap up a freelance piece, but then I think I am free to go. I was hoping for a few months of wellness and some time to organize my affairs. But if it’s time, it’s time. I fought, off and on, for six years. I’m tired. I feel awful all the time. I’m ready to go if my platelets are too low for this last dose. I’ve had a good run.