Good luck chuck

ok i got some energy and i thought i would follow through with some cc horror stories :)

i think writing about them will give people an idea of some of the things that can happen to cc patients apart from the obvious chemo nausea and fatigue....so if youre going through chemo make sure to ask your docs what the side effects (even the rare ones) are for every drug they put you on. So you may be wondering why im calling this entry " Good luck chuck" ?

well it has a little bit to do with the movie....and a lot to do with what i like to call my crazy days..

It all started on a regular visit to the hospital...some time in october of 2007...during my first cc treatment. After about a month of living in the hospital...i was discharged and began an outpatient treatment plan for the next 7 months. So this 'regular' visit turned out to be not so regular...I was doing well.....so well that the nurses told me that i could take a long weekend and get chemo on a monday instead of the planned sunday. Shahrzad was ecstatic but for some reason....this news really confused me. I simply couldnt wrap my mind around it. So after leaving the ward and getting in the car i asked shahrzad "did the nurses just give us a long weekend?" and she answered " yes".....and you'd think that would have cleared things up but i was still confused. During the drive home i asked Shahrzad a total of 10 times about the changed chemo date, and every time she answered with even more detail....but no matter the answer...i was uneasy. Even though i knew what the answer would be i felt the strangest urge to ask??I felt completely out of my body...

So my wife tells me that during this time she just chalked my confusion up to a way of dealing with my cc diagnosis. She calmed me down by telling me that it was completely normal to feel disconnected when something like this happens (getting cc that is)...so we went about our day....if we only knew haha

The next day was worse than the day before...while my wife was watching tv with me i kept feeling like she was upset with me....and i would ask her what i had done and no matter how many times she told me nothing was wrong i didnt believe her. By the end of the day i started telling her that i thought i was losing my mind so we decided to sit down and say some prayers to calm me down.

Now from here on out I dont remeber a lot of what happend so im telling you what my wife and my family saw. Shahrzad said that while reading the prayer she noticed i was taking small peices of tissue, rolling them into 4 balls, and placing them in a line between us. When she asked me what i was doing i replied " YOU are the crazy one! i just proved it! you said the prayer 4 times!" She only made it half way through one.

when dinner came around my mind was in full blown crazy mode. when my sister and brother asked me to decide between 3 movies: harry potter, good luck chuck, and another one i cant remember i chose Good luck chuck...but when my brother asked me if we could see harry potter instead i replied " Good luck chuck".....then my wife asked me another question and i replied "good luck chuck" and for the rest of the questions that night i replied " good luck chuck"...just like a broken record. When i finally stopped saying good luck chuck i stopped talking altogether. my family kept asking me why i wouldnt talk and i just pointed at my watch laughing and smiling. Obviously this whole time they were calling the docs and at midnight i finally spoke. when my mother asked me why i wouldnt speak i said

" because they told me not to"

So i was admitted back into the hospital and for the next 10 days lost my mind more and more. I didnt know the date, i couldnt remember my wifes name, i thought the nurses were trying to assasinate my mother and that Shahrzad was the only one who could stop them, i tried escaping the hospital about four times, Shahrzad tells me stories of how she had to wrestle me down to the ground to stop me from leaving the ward at 5 in the morning. I would stop eating for days and stop talking for days, i refused to take medication....the only way they could get me to take them was when shahrzad pretended that if i didnt take them... she would have to. I would wake up in the middle of the night, pee in a cup and stay in the bathroom for hours to make sure the bad guys didnt get it.....Shahrzad told me that she would have to treat me like a child....she would trick me into looking the other way while she grabbed the urine and flushed it. She stayed with me almost everynight until the hickman incident..after that my mom forced her to go home and rest.

what is the hickman incident? well let me tell you.

First of all...from Wikipedia:

A Hickman line is an intravenous catheter most often used for the administration of chemotherapy or other medications, as well as for the withdrawal of blood for analysis...

My Hickman was put in at the beginning of treatment and one night during my crazy days i decided that i didnt really like it after all. Shahrzad tells me that she woke up at 3 a.m and found me full blown naked getting out of my hospital bed. I had wet the bed and so she called the nurse over to get clean sheets. While about 3 nurses cleaned the bed, Shahrzad was holding me up when i suddenly grabbed hold of my Hickman line and pulled as hard as i could! I remember hearing the nurses freak out and start swearing a lot..i guess they werent used to dealing with crazy people haha. I thought i was successful and had pulled out the line... but shahrzad told me later that she managed to grab the line right above my hand so the tubing snapped instead of coming out of me. I remember her just looking at me holding my hickman and saying " why did you do that Nima....you know that was dangerous"

So a doc had to be called in and i had to have minor surgery to get the line out...i had completely pulled off the bottom half that has all the outlets and made the line basically useless...if i had pulled it out i would have bled out and probably died....so im forever thankful to my wife....i still cant understand how she stayed completely calm that night even when the nurses were yelling "S*&%#....F*%$# he pulled it out!!" all around her.

anyway the next night wasnt great either....my mom spent the night with me and she said that i was being disruptive or something so they had to restrain me....and they gave me a sedative. Things basically just got worse...I was put through tons of tests to check my brain, physiological tests...you name it...i got it...the docs didnt know what was wrong with me....and not to sound ungrateful but some of the docs really didnt listen to my mom or shahrzad. The whole time Shahrzad kept telling them that she thought the reason i was like this was because i had just stopped taking a steroid called prednisone and with all the research online it says that a steroid induced psychosis can happen when you dont taper off the steroid( it eventually wears off by itself)...well they didnt think that was the case. So they just told my family that i maybe just had a psychotic break because of how hard it is to deal with a cc diagnosis...and that they didnt know if i would ever get better...

This story has a good ending....as you can tell.....i eventually did get better...it took about two weeks but i slowly just got back to normal. I was afraid for a long time afterwards that i was going crazy again but thank God it hasnt happened. Anyway the good news is that when we moved to toronto...our doctor here thought it was ridiculous that the docs in vancouver didnt listen to my mom and Shahrzad. He said it was OBVIOUSLY a steroid induced psychosis. I really wish they had just told my family and Shahrzad that....it would have saved them a lot of tears and worry.

Anyway here are two videos about 3 weeks after my crazy days. They opted not to put in another hickman line haha just incase i went crazy again...so this is them putting in my PICC. sorry bout the camera moving alot....Shahrzad was trying not to watch while she was filming and my sister in law leila was also having a bit of a hard time haha. just a warning....if youre not interested in surgical procedures....dont watch this.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

peace