Dexamethasone

I'm going to try to explain the power of Dexamethasone (Dex). Dex is the steroid I take as chemotherapy. Since it's my only current medication, it's pretty easy to identify its powers. It's amazing stuff.

Here's the scenario. During the last 4 days of my very recent 8 day downtime, I contracted some sort of upper respiratory crud. One of the girls in the office was among the walking sickies and I appear to have caught what she got from her kid. Regardless of what it was called, she felt yucky.

So, I catfished for 4 days and then had a cold for the next four catfish days. Yucky doesn't quite describe it. Respiratory problems with all kinds of crud coming out of my nose and mouth, bone pain, muscle pain, a fever of 100 F, gastric distress, severe testicular pain, muscle cramps in my legs and hands - probably 100 cramps a day (no exaggeration), certainly exhaustion. January 1 was spent completely in bed.

On Monday the 2nd I called in sick. I just couldn't do it. I needed rest but I had the oncologist appointment that afternoon and I was supposed to pick up the refill for my Dex.

I got the Dex at about 2 pm and decided to cheat. I took 2 Dex about 14 hours early.

By the time I saw the doc at 3:30 I felt 100% perfectly normal. No illness, no pain, no nothing. After talking about my numbers, I was probably slightly manic.

By bedtime, I had more energy than I needed. I almost started a project in the garage.

By 1 am I was envisioning ways to kill another guy with my bare hands. (Two of you will remember things.)

By 3 am I forced myself to sleep. At 5:30 the alarm went off and I arrived at the office as fresh as a daisy and with a song in my heart.

Of course, at 6 am I'd had breakfast and EIGHT more Dex as prescribed. See, I take 10 a day when I'm "on". Yeah, TEN. Think about it. Two has the power to turn a man from bat-shit into Batman. Ten causes a person to change planes of existence.

I exist in that altered state for 4 days at a time. Then I'm forced back through untold dimensions (or dementia?) to pay the bill for rampant excesses, both physical and mental. No wonder my second day down always feels like I played tackle football all day, crashed a racebike, and then lost a barfight.

And just about the time my body starts to heal from the barfight, its time for another round of Dex. Right up there, boyo! Slingshot recovery! No pain, all gain! Welcome to 'roid junkie heaven!

According to the doc, I'm on my last "maximum strength" round of Dex. If the numbers stay good and I'm given the stamp of remission, I go on a maintenance dose that's probably as low as 4 days per month instead of roughly 4 days a week. I don't really know how I'm going to like that.

See, if I could give up the Dex completely, then the monkey might not get a good grip on my back (and he's a hard little bugger to fight). But if I'm supposed to babysit the monkey once a month........