Dying on the Floor In Diapers

Before I can tell the stories of beauty, the stories that are so easy to read and that uplift, I must first continue to trudge through the muck of my tales of descent.
 

Round two of chemo brought on not the cramps of my previous labor-in-the-bank-lobby but torrential menstrual bleeding, and most definitely is a tale in my book of woe.

It starting on a Friday afternoon, like so many health problems do, and lasted until I could get help on Monday. Seventy-two hours of aberrant, disconcerting bleeding plagued the weekend.

The hemorrhaging came so quickly and so profusely, just leaving the bathroom was a challenge. Towels, rags, extra thick pads, my son’s polka-dot diapers, nothing could hold the blood flow for any significant amount of time.

An immediate call on Friday to the oncology nurse (“heavy menstrual bleeding is common with chemo”), an emergency page to my oncologist on Sunday morning (“you can go into the ER today or you can just come into the office tomorrow morning”) and a Sunday afternoon visit to the urgent care (“your hemoglobin results wouldn’t come back for 24 hours, so we can’t do anything today”) were all wholly unhelpful.

I was left to eek through the weekend hours, laying in the empty bathtub and bleeding. Our bathroom was a like a butcher shop, red and stinking of warm metal, as I essentially laid dying on the floor.

By Sunday I was weak and light-headed. I couldn’t make it up our staircase without stopping to rest after every couple of steps. I breathed heavily and moved slowly. I was sheet-white.

But the blood just kept coming.

While it was frightening and utterly strange and miserable, it was also kind of... ordinary. If a normal/rational/healthy person was bleeding out in their bathtub through the weekend, that person would likely get themselves to an Emergency Room with an expectation of at least some degree of help or healing. But that's the thing about being miserable; the miserable snakes in and pushes the normal out, little-by-little, changing how you interpret and understand your world. Neither expectations nor healing felt realistic. 

So I just waited.