NO More!

"No you can not start an IV to inject me with contrast dye."  It is nine o'clock at night on a Friday at MD Anderson and I've just been called back for an MRI...really it is late at night, the hospital schedules MRI's until eleven.  I have had it. I want to go home. I miss Cody and Ophelia.  I’m tired, I’m cranky, they can’t access my port…I am done.  The nurses in the MRI area are not aware that the infusion area, where I can get my port accessed, is closed.  They sent me up to the eighth floor to get my port accessed; the eighth floor was dark and completely empty, except for the guard sitting in the stem cell transplant waiting area talking on the phone.  Why did I go through surgery to get a stupid port if none one can access it?  This is the last straw and I am out of here.  This MRI is not an emergency, and if they want to do one then the hospital can damn well schedule me when they can access my port!  I’m sick and tired of being stuck, prodded, poked, poisoned, and generally humiliated. I’m sick of filling out the same freaking paperwork each time I check-in for a new appointment – is it so hard to share information in the same hospital?  I’m really, really, really getting sick and tired of being at the hospital.  Cody and I know every shortcut, every elevator, every floor (except for the seventh which is reserved for Genitourinary Cancer) of the Mays clinic; and we know the twists, turns, and hidden waiting areas of the main hospital.  We know that the walk between the Mays clinic and the main building takes twenty minutes on the sky bridge, and if you can’t walk they will shuttle you in a golf cart.  My research nurse, Julia, said that the last few weeks of taxol are when patients get really sick of the hospital.  Well I have finally reached my limit.  I need a vacation.  If I didn’t know that I would have to start all of this over from the beginning I would just stay home.  Unfortunately I can’t stay home, but I don’t have to have an MRI tonight.  The MRI can wait until I’m back in Houston for my next chemo treatment, and when someone is around to access my port.  Up until this moment I’ve been good and let them do whatever the hell they want to me.  I’ve shown up for all of my appointments on-time, never complaining that they are redundant or that I don’t want a particular test.  Now I’m done.  If they want me to do more crappy tests then they are going to do them on my terms.  Everyone has one little thing that causes them to rebel, their proverbial nut to crack, and I guess mine is the idea of being stuck with one more needle.  Small wonder since I hate needles so much I made it the title of my blog.  Monday I go back to MD Anderson for my tenth taxol treatment, only two left.  We only have three more weeks in a row that we have to be in Houston every Sunday, then at MD Anderson every Monday.  Once April begins I only have four more chemotherapy treatments, but these are every three weeks – yeah!  The drugs they will give me are much harder on my body, but I get to be home more than five days out of the week.  The tunnel is still really long and dark, but there is a flash of light in the distance.