Chemotherapy weakens patients to the point their legs may buckle underneath them. Falling is not fun.
A couple of weeks ago people were falling all over the place in the chemotherapy room. There’s no surer way to get the attention of every nurse in the room than to keel over. A foot can slide on a slick spot on the linoleum. Carts, chairs, wastebaskets and IV racks are everywhere. A toe in the wrong place and down you go.
If you are lucky, you sprain or bruise something. You don’t want to hear a crack. You don’t want a broken bone on top of cancer to worry about. In football they call that piling on. Perhaps the worst would be a knock up side your head. That’s the first thing the nurses ask when someone goes down. No one needs a concussion.
After witnessing all of this first hand at the clinic, my wife slipped in our bedroom. I got her up to the foot of the bed she didn’t move the rest of the night. Luckily, our son, a corrections officer and trained to handle all kinds of situations like this, is close by and ready to help out.
I bought a second-hand walker which got her from the bedroom to the family room. Each day her mobility improves, but just going from one room to another wears her out. It happened she had a CT scan this week. The best news from the report is that the cancer has been reduced by 90 percent. Also good was that the leg was bruised and not cracked or broken.
The irony, she discovered, was that no matter how much it hurt to walk, she had to walk so the leg would stop hurting altogether.
More pain to get rid of the pain. So what else is new?