Is Everything a Symptom?

My weekly velcade injection also left its mark emotionally and physically. The needle was administered subcutaneously (under the skin) in my stomach. Sometime it stung badly and made me grit my teeth which made me loathe velcade appointments. Sometimes the nurses taped a bandage over the injection site and sometimes they didn’t. A day later a bright red patch would appear on my stomach, in about an inch (3 cm) round circle. Then it would fade into a brown bruise. At first these patches were not uncomfortable. By the tenth injection the patch that formed was very dry and I had to put lotion on it.  By the thirteenth injection the site got itchy for days and a bit painful. When the new symptoms of itchiness and pain began I watched the site closely. One week I was horrified to see a black patch appear next to the injection site. I showed it to a nurse.

      “Look, there’s a weird sort of bruise that’s developed.” I said, with my shirt pulled up so the nurse could look closely.

      “Hmmm.” She put her face towards my stomach then rubbed the bruise with her finger. “It’s coming off.”

      “What?” I struggled to look at the black spot without reading glasses and over my middle-aged spread.

      “It’s coming off.” She repeated without a single judgmental inflection.

      I gave the area a rub with my fingers and all the black came off. It was the glue from a bandage that was put on the week before. I was embarrassed that I not only mistook it for a new symptom, but also that I obviously didn’t wash myself very well.

      “Oops.” I said sheepishly.

      My last injection on April 10^th, before the stem cell collection, was the worst. The redness, itchiness and pain lasted for almost a week. But the black patch never came back!

      It was a weird effect of being sick that, like the “bruise” from the injection, every tiny thing I felt or saw on my body was a potential symptom of my disease. These “symptoms” all provoked a constant reminder that my death was imminent. This started as soon as I was diagnosed. By the beginning of January I wrote in my diary that “the heel of my right foot and my knees feel weird and my chest is a little tight”. For the next couple of months my diary was full of these types of entries:

      When I sat on the toilet my knees felt a bit funny and are probably full of cancer. I think I can feel a small lump in the inside of my right breast. I banged my head on the corner of a kitchen cupboard door today. I was scared that I created some sort of hematoma that will lead to my death. I looked at my stomach and there was a small red patch around yesterday’s injection site with two long jagged lines of red leading from it going south. It is a different look than before. I feel lightheaded. My hands are a bit tingly and it feels like my gums are shrinking or the roots of my front two bottom teeth are getting weak. Also the water tastes foul, like metal. My top left molar has a bit of pain too. I developed a small cough today. I have a nagging worry about my sinuses. There are two little blisters on the inside of my bottom lip. On the left side of my mouth it feels like there is an ulcer forming. My right top two teeth next to my front teeth have pain. I checked them tonight to see if they were loose but they were not. I worry that my teeth are falling out again. Also my nose bled a little when I blew it today. Last night while I was watching TV I felt like my right heel was going numb as if in the very early stages of pins and needles but not quite there. I’ve noticed that a lot of the food I eat tastes like it has mint in it. I taste mint when I eat something not remotely mint-like, like lasagna or cereal. I am worried I will develop a lazy bowel from using so many laxatives. My heart is pounding too hard all the time. I am also breathing a lot of short, shallow breaths and can’t get my lungs full. While watching a movie I feel a funny, kind of painful sensation in the left side of my neck like there is something stuck in an artery or something and I have a brief vision of myself bleeding out right there on the lazy boy but no one notices. Everyone keeps watching the movie because it is good.

      These sort of daydream “visions” happened all the time. One afternoon I had a vision that my head was splitting open between my eyes. It was so real. I visualized a gap that opened between my eyebrows and cleaved its way to the top of my head. My eyes rolled outwards to the sides of my face and the two halves of my scalp, now completely separate from each other, fell on to my shoulders. I could see it so well. What did it mean? That I couldn’t handle all the stress and I was splitting apart at the seams?