We were going to try the allopurinol with Benadryl and prednisone, and my body said, “Nope. Not having it,” and threatened me with Stevens-Johnson syndrome if I didn’t stop this nonsense right this minute. I seem to tolerate the Venclexta — no nausea, vomiting or any of those shenanigans, but allopurinol is right out. And to be frank, I’m so glad the itching has stopped that I almost don’t care that I’m doing the skin peel thing all over my body again (except that my hands peel worst of all, which is severely annoying because I can’t knit!) I think I must be working on, like, my third set of skin this year.
I had a basic metabolic panel done yesterday and my BUN was the only value that was not within normal limits. It was high, but not all that high. I’m in limbo right now. Everything is stopped but the prednisone. I’d just as soon stop it too as I’m getting noticeably strung out on it. This morning, I felt nauseous after I took the two meds I have to take on an empty stomach, and I just rolled over and went back to sleep without taking any of the rest of my meds, including the prednisone. That was at 9:30. I woke up at nearly 5:00, having slept the day away. It felt good to sleep until I was done sleeping.
In the knitting news, I frogged that shawl I was working on because it wonked on me big time. It would have taken short rows to fix and I don’t have the band width right now to deal with short rows. But then I had this idea for a top-down crescent shawl with a twisted cable top border. You’re always seeing crescent shawls that start with a garter tab. If you want a fancy top border, you have to go back and knit it on. My idea was to use a Turkish cast-on instead of a garter tab, and knit the top border as you go. Turns out it works very nicely, thank you very much, even with a yarn over (yo) detail between the border and the garter stitch shawl body. There’s only a tiny wonky bit right at the center, but you have to hunt for it.
I’m about 5 inches into it and it keeps calling my name and I YEARN to be working on it, but I’ve tried knitting in these Laytex gloves and nope! And my bare hands are so snaggy because they’re peeling hand over fist. AARRGGHH!!
I’m reusing the same Caron Simply Soft (“Ocean”) acrylic yarn I was using for the frogged shawl. Caron Simply Soft tends to be splitty to begin with, and being knitted and frogged five or six times doesn’t help. (“Splitty” to a knitter means the strand of yarn has a tendency to untwist and separate into plies, which makes it harder for the point of the needle to catch the whole strand to make a stitch. That’s one of the downsides of acrylic yarn. Wool yarn, because it’s basically hair, has a “built-in” tendency to curl. A good spinner works the spinning and plying with the curl so that once a wool yarn is spun and plied, its natural tendency is to stay that way.)
Speaking of natural tendencies, I seem to have a natural tendency to dream during sleep. Even when I wake up without the aid of annoying noises (alarm clocks), I always seem to be waking up out of a dream. It’s like sleep is a sea of dreams, and I’m a whale. I sound down into the depths and stay down for hours. I come up for air briefly, and down I go again. Most of my dreams are fairly hum-drum and nondescript. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time looking for my car in parking lots, or walking to some destination I’m not sure how to get to. My dreams have little emotional affect attached to them, apart from a vague, free-floating anxiety when I can’t find my car. (That’s what made the nightmares I had when I first started taking metoprolol so jarring and upsetting.)
I suspect that’s a function of my being where I am on the spectrum. Because of the unaddressed emotional disconnect my “light” autism created in my life from a very early age, I have become the cat that walks by herself and all places are alike to me. Being on my own has never bothered me.
(Our neighborhood feral cat.)
I’m basically a pretty stolid person, which I get from my dad, the Marine veteran of WWII in the Pacific. He was pretty much unrattleable. I did get a little “what-if” anxiety from my mom, but that plays out in an interesting way. (A “what if-er” is a type of anxiety where the busy brain is always asking — what if this terrible thing happens? what if that terrible thing happens? It’s pretty easy for them to spiral off into a state of paralyzing anxiety. I think my mom spent a good deal of her life anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop and anxiously wondering which shoe it would be.)
Gemini that I am, now and again, I will catch myself having an interesting internal dialogue between the “dad” part of my brain and the “mom” part. For a recent example, I’m walking from the building 40 feet to where my car is parked and I’ll have this random intrusive thought — (mom) What if I slipped and fell and hurt myself? There’s nobody around. I could lie here on the pavement for hours . . . (dad) I would get out my cell phone and call Security, and they would come and help me. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s interesting when it does. It’s that “dad” part of my brain that makes me stop and think through a complicated task before I jump into the middle of it by saying things like, “No, always sweep/vacuum first and dust last; that gives the dust you stir up sweeping/vacuuming time to settle so you’ll catch it when you dust.” Last week, when I was having those severe side effects, it was that “dad” part of my brain that said, “Maybe you need to get up and go throw the deadbolt before you close your apartment door just in case, so the EMS people won’t have to wait for Security to come open your door if you can’t.”
As I say, right now I’m in a holding pattern waiting for a call from my oncologist as to what to do next.