The Cancer Couch Foundation

Loved Ones Who've Lost Someone to Breast Cancer

the next I’m projectile vomiting in a beat up hospital gown at 1 am on 3 nurses, as they insert a tube down my nose to my stomach to pump it out because I could not stop throwing up on my own. I have looked everywhere, but I simply can not find the pamphlet I should have received – the one with the crazy lady with the filthy hair, in the horrible medical gown, dangling her tortured, bloated, bandaged body off the GW bridge  – ready to jump because she is a gigantic baby with no patience who simply can’t take another second of the unrelenting pain and discomfort inflicted by this surgery. Or, maybe if I weren’t such a head-in-the-clouds unrealistic dreamer I would have realized, prior to my all-inclusive stay-cation, that the reality is – if you are in fact well enough to rest your fat arse comfortably in bed, eat and drink all you want, read and watch TV and chat it up with your buds- Rather, it was 9 days and 8 nights of pure hell, filled with unrelenting pain, screaming  – alternating with moaning, then groaning – then yelling at everyone to stop making so much noise when they breathe – and those were my finer moments:)

Ah, Spring Break…all the cheesy tag-lines that have been attached to it over the years come to mind …”Girls Gone Wild; Sun’s Out Guns Out; Fun in the Sun!” They conjure up images of clear blue waters, tropical islands, fancy cold drinks with cute umbrellas, beach volleyball, etc… And as I watch so many of my friends, and even my own children, head off on their southern sojourns this year – I take solace in the fact that I’m doing something much more interesting and exotic right here in CT. My 2016 Spring Break will consist of: no crowds, very light packing of some comfy leisure wear and a great stack of books, room service in bed for every meal, an adult-only setting, all you can eat jello, unlimited ginger-ale, and free cozy socks with treads on the bottom

The valet guys and technicians feel like old friends, and I’ve gotten to know the other poor unfortunate souls in the waiting room – mostly by diagnosis and number of treatments each person has left. Actually – I’m ridiculously overly-flattered every time they tell me I’m really good at it – I wrap that thing around me like it’s cashmere and tie the strings tight as if I’m about to walk down a runway in Milan. The best way I can describe it is to imagine you have a patch of skin that got badly sunburned, then you ran that patch of skin straight into a thorny rosebush that happened to be housing 1000 hungry mosquitos that then bite you all over that patch of skin to finish the job.