Life in (and on) the Crapper

"What'cha caught there, li'l buddy?"  Um, C-Diff." "Hmm.  I C."
I made that joke up. Can you tell?

All right, y'all. It's been a hot minute.

It's day 17 in the hospital.

So, after all the chemo, at least partially documented in my last post, I got to rest for a day. That was day 8, or what we're now calling day 0. So today is day 17/+9. Nine days out from my transplant.

Let's talk about the transplant. Y'all know that the collection was long and rough. If you need a refresher, it's here. Well, because the process was so long, I ended up with fifteen (that's 15, y'all) bags of stem cells that they had to put back into me.

And go into me they did. All fifteen bags, filled with my stem cells and, apparently, creamed corn.

Ah, creamed corn. A culinary delicacy. At least when my wife makes it.

Unfortunately, it was a lot more like this.

It's just nasty, y'all.

Apparently, it's the preservative the stem cells are floating in. And it smells exactly like nasty from-a-can creamed corn. That's maybe sat out on the counter too long. In the sun.

I couldn't smell anything after the first few minutes. Everyone else could. And they made it crystal clear that the smell was NOT OKAY.

It seeped into every nook and cranny of the room. It oozed from my pores. I exuded creamed corn.

And it lingered. It was days before I started to smell like a normal human again. But even during that time I stank to high heaven, my wife would come and snuggle me and tell me it was all right while actively suppressing her gag reflex.

But I got my stem cells!

Over the next few days, my white blood cell count completely tanked. Like down to zero tanked.

Then I got sick. Yeah, I know. I was already sick. Well, I got sicker.

When it comes to stem cell transplant patients, 95% of us get neutropenic fever. I've talked about this before, when it happened to me during my RICE treatments. Anyhoo, the secondary infection happens because you have quite literally no defenses whatsoever (except for the emotional kind, which never really go away, do they?).

I was really hoping to be part of the 5% who don't get one, but that is not what happened. Instead, I got C. diff. Look, y'all have been on the nasty train with me before, and I don't really feel like reliving it, so check the link if you want to know the gnarly deets. Or the aforementioned blog post.

It was a rough week. There was an enormous amount of discomfort, with a good scattering of out-and-out pain. I was physically pretty miserable.

Things were... well, crappy. And yes, I spent much time on the crapper, and a lot more time feeling like I was inside of it.

Here's the thing, though. It could have been SO MUCH WORSE.

If I had gotten the flu or something respiratory, I'd be in the ICU right now. Not that C. diff can't be dangerous, but there really wasn't any chance of me ending up in intensive care.

So even though I was physically pretty bad off, emotionally I did a lot better than I did last time I had neutropenic fever. I felt... mostly peaceful. Even during the most intense moments, I was able, more often than not, to breathe through them.

And now, I'm feeling so much better! Now I mostly just feel like a normal chemo patient.

WINNING, baby!

I'm back to eating solid foods, the nausea is down, the pain is mild... I'm GOLD, y'all.

One more great thing? Today, for the first time since my transplant, I HAVE ABSOLUTE NEUTROPHILS! Know what that means? It means engraftment has begun. My body's starting to produce it's own white blood cells again. The hard restart we did to my body is... starting.

It takes time after engraftment for my levels to get back up to where they need to be for me to be released into the wild, and that varies from person to person, but this is fantastic news. It means that I'm on my way.

So I guess what I'm saying is that things might really suck for you right now. I sincerely hope not, but if it's not now, it'll be sometime. It happens to everyone I've ever met. I'm fairly confident it's a human thing that no one really completely avoids.

But if we can breathe... just that. Breathe. Everything else is secondary. Maybe all we can do is crawl into a hole and take a breath in, let it go out, repeat.

It. Will. Pass.

Nothing is completely permanent in this world. Not success, not failure. Not sickness, not health.

Not life.

If you're suffering right now, it won't last forever. This, too, shall pass. I know it's meager scraps. It hardly feels sufficient at first, but it's what got me through the last week.

And I feel pretty good about that.
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Up for future discussion... on a scale of 1 to Gilbert Gottfried, how irritating are Ben's postscripts?

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