One of many first things we do each morning is stand on a scale. Michele is about my age. She's studying at the U. Part of her internship (or maybe it's just a student work program) is to wheel a large scale up and down the halls. The scale has hand grips, waist high, almost like a treadmill. Michele wants to make sure that we're not losing too much weight. It's something that needs to be monitored for all the patients on the sixth floor. It's another number that must be written down, tracked, charted, looking for trends in the digits.
Sometimes I'm awake when she knocks on my door, sometimes not. She is very kind. She brings the scale close to my bed so I don't have to shuffle too far, especially if I haven't been able to wake up yet. The hand rests are padded, which is nice. I don't have to lift my feet or anything. Just shuffle bare feet, stand still for a few seconds, then watch the numbers climb.
165 is as good a starting point as any. When I'm bleeding from the Hickman, those first days, the numbers steadily tick upward. I extend my arms, pointing to the dark bruises underneath my right arm, like a dark, heavy sac. Every day the numbers creep up. They stop at 175.
The bleeding eventually slows. The bruises stop growing. Things settle down. Michele smiles. We hold fast for days before the chemo starts to kick in. With my appetite gone, the numbers drop steadily, a pound or so every day.
Back down to 165.
160.
155.
150.
There's really nothing I can do to stop the pounds from dropping, to stop the chart from trending down. I don't want to eat. Hell, I couldn't eat if I wanted to. But I would like to stay above 150. A magic number, I guess, simple and round. It'll take me about a month to lose the twenty-five pounds to get down that low.
And I can't do anything about the other five I'll lose in the final days before I leave. One forty-five.
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