Minor side-effects

They look like soft-shell crabs, plump and bright red as if coming out of hot water. They are firmly fastened to my forearms so no doubts are allowed: those are my hands. They have been swelling during my shift at the Hospice house yesterday – I work weekends this month. I showed them to my friends Nurses. “Edema” said one. The fact is, I had been warned that my feet could swell, a classic side-effect of chemo. I did not expect it would strike – not my feet – but my hands, and all of sudden, at work.

“What should I do?”  One of my friends said that keeping hands elevated would help. But when you start a conversation with a patient or her family, holding your arms up in the air as if threatened by a gun is not exactly an option.

Eventually I called the hotline of my oncologist – it is reassuring to be able to describe symptoms to a medical person whatever the time and days. She prescribed steroids. After work I went to the pharmacy with Irvin– so tired that the thing I wanted most was my bed. As soon as we were home, I disappeared under the blankets, and in spite of my usual insomniac self and the addition of steroids, I slept through the night.

Today, my hands were still swollen and red, and itchy – I kept rubbing them together like a fly meditating on its next move. I called back the oncologist office when I felt a twitching in my lips. I looked in a mirror and was startled to see I looked like a starlet after an unfortunate encounter with a Botox injection. My lips had doubled in volume.  This was probably an allergic reaction, I was told. But reaction to what? It could be the chemo, something I ate or… the steroids. I got Benadryl, as prescribed. It has helped with the itching, I must say, but progress otherwise is slow to come.

This is weird: my lips feel alien to me; holding stuff (or typing) with those chubby fingers is awkward. And I am supposed to be more connected than ever to my complex psyche: I must complete my midterm papers tonight and present them to my peer group and supervisor tomorrow. My pastoral functioning, which I am supposed to describe, has reached a new level of conceptual sophistication…