This week San and I tried an experiment, at Dr. Sud’s suggestion. We cut back and then ended my daily routine of painkillers. The reason? I’m no longer experiencing pain. I’ve also cut back on the nausea pill to once a day (as compared to once every four hours), and really the only reason I’m sticking with that one is because it is also part of the fluids given to me when I do the chemo treatments. After I complete all of those treatments, I’ll drop it too. Our goal is to return me to normal, or a “new normal,” that does not include a dependence on drugs. Ending my association with oxycodone is a very large, very important step in that direction.

Ending my painkiller pill habit did not bring with it any negative side effects. But it has brought back into my life a certain clarity of thought and even a little testiness in the face of things that unsettle my personal sense of truth and justice, as well as my preferred progressive version of The American Way of Life.

So, for example, when I received an unwanted email from an unknown corporate CEO demanding – maybe just insisting, but it felt like a demand – a “conference call with me to explore business solutions to my problems as the director of a school,” promising me the usual crap in language that teach students to avoid (“effective business strategies … plans to build and enable strong processes, and … create value by innovative steps that power progress and achieve competitive advantage for your firm. … help you to achieve the improved productivity and performance, as well as the cost reductions and cost avoidance … our people are our assets”), and listing as his “satisfied clients” many of the companies involved in the current financial mess on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C., I laughed at the sheer mass marketing wrongness of it.

Returned to the Four Winds Cancer Clinic yesterday to begin “lightweight maintenance chemo.” I didn’t sleep well the night before, my blood pressure was elevated, and I was strangely a little nervous. But once again the lovely and caring people who we are all so fortunate to have working there cheered me up, checked me out, made sure San and I were comfortable, pronounced me “looking good” (always makes me smile) and plugged me in. The whole procedure took about an hour – way better than the seven hours or so I used to do – and so far there have been no negative side effects. I slept soundly last night and feel good today.

Here’s the thing: Chemo is a four-letter profanity masked as a five-letter friend. No one likes it, not in the Clinic or on Facebook. We fear it. We tolerate it because it promises a longer life and in most cases that I’ve witnessed a longer quality of life. But to achieve that desired result requires opening your veins to a poison regime that seizes control of your body and mind, unleashes an army of silent killers inside of you, and sometimes can be very unpleasant afterward, for you and for those around you, for days at time. And, with a cancer such as mine, in the end you die. Those are the facts.

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