Trying so so so hard…

Not to whine and complain. Trying really, really, really hard. ‘Cause, let me tell you, with a 3 year old and a 6 year old in the house, I hear a lot of whining and complaining and it isn’t pleasant to the ears.

So the cancer, I’m dealing with it. It isn’t fun, surely we can agree on that, but what good will complaining do? Chemo last week was better. I got some new drugs to manage the nausea and vomiting and actually made it through the whole cycle without any food coming back up. Progress! Of course the steroids which are helping with the nausea are making me a little twitchy and aren’t particularly conducive to restful sleep. But I think Sean enjoys when I poke him in the back in the middle of the night to say “I can’t sleep” (seriously, the man deserves sainthood for putting up with me).

The kids are good, the chemo is manageable, my days are so much more good than bad…so what’s the problem? Well I seem to have torn open my abdominal muscle around my surgery site (I had about a 10 inch vertical incision in the middle of my abdomen). So I have a big fat abdominal hernia. Which makes it hurt to sit, stand, walk, breathe…you get the idea. Of course, I can’t have surgery because that would interrupt my chemo for ~10 weeks which isn’t a good idea. And they make lots of abdominal binders for hernias, but none that fit around a colostomy stoma. So I walk around like an idiot with my hands pressed against my stomach trying to keep my intestines from poking out of the hole in my abdominal muscle. Sound fun?

Last night I was having a coughing fit (at 11:30 pm, see note above about Sean needing sainthood) and desperately trying to press on the hernia so the coughing didn’t hurt so much. There may have been some profanity uttered, I can’t be certain. Finally, a light bulb went on over my head…Codeine…codeine is a cough suppressant…and a painkiller. Note to friends…never throw away prescription painkillers. Two vicodin and thirty minutes later, both Sean and I were sleeping peacefully. Obviously this strategy doesn’t work during daylight hours, but at least now I’m not whining about this blasted hernia 24 hours a day. Sixteen hours a day is plenty.