Entering the Doldrums

The elation of last week's test results was intense but unfortunately, short lived.  For two glorious days, hope reigned, and I dared to let myself dream about the future, to imagine possibilities as potential realities - something I have been unable to do for months.  If you know us, then you know we always have some scheme brewing.  Our next adventure begins germination even as the fresh cotyledons of our current situation still unfold.

But in the face of this overwhelming uncertainty, I have recently found myself completely unable to project my imagination forward in time.  Any attempt at daydreaming about tomorrow is quickly interrupted by ifs and thens too awful to face.  Even during good times, keeping my sights on the horizon, knowing the next big move is approaching helps trivialize the minor frustrations of the here and now.  Discomfort can be rationalized when it is perceived as the price for a ticket to excitement yet to come, but when tomorrow is unimaginable, that discomfort becomes all-consuming.

Usually, such discomfort is merely psychic - boredom, irritation, restlessness - but with the commencement of Kevin's newest medication, discomfort has taken on a whole new physical dimension, one that dominates all waking thought and obliterates the view like a thick fog, warps the magnetic fields of my emotional compass.

The side effects of the new medication are horrible, and they have had a profound impact on his disposition.  No number or result or indicator of progress can keep his mood buoyed against the weight of his current distress.  He is deflated from the fleeting sense of achieve-ability he felt during the lead-in with the Interferon and Ribavirin alone, and has turned the full force of his hatred onto the Boceprivir.  Where as before, time was measured by the swift weeks in between injections, it is now gauged by the long miserable hours between thrice daily doses.

He is aware of it constantly.  It cannot be pushed aside.  And not just because the 4-capsules-every-8-hours dosing schedule dominates his daily meal planning and taxes his memory, but because it is ever present - he can taste it constantly, a horrible bitter flavor only temporarily displaced by the steady insertion of sweets into the mouth.  He can smell it, in his burps, in his exhalations, his sweat, his urine.  It blisters the delicate tissue at either end of the digestive tract and wreaks havoc on the membranes in between, such that hourly visits to the toilet are a new preoccupation.  He can feel it in his blood, which has become thick and heavy in his arteries, no longer a nourishing river of healing, but now a filthy drainpipe existing only to carry this awful chemical to his kidneys and away.

This will be a test of endurance unlike any we have known.  Right now, when I look to the future, all I can see is the daily cycle of nausea, grouchiness, depression, insomnia...the long stretches between appointments and the relatively few signposts of progress towards the completion of treatment.

Oh, what I would give for just ten minutes of a good believable fantasy...