We’re Up all Night to get Leucky

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I’m up all night to get blood
I’m up all night to get some
I’m up all night for nurse fun
We’re up all night to get #LEUCKY

The night between the 26th and 27th, my night nurse came in to check my vitals at midnight. I had taken my nightly Ambien (totally necessary to sleep while roiding out on Prednisone) so I was toeing the line of consciousness that exists only if you’ve forced yourself to stay awake for longer than 48 straight hours. I’m talking total misunderstanding of your own ego, the point where you aren’t sure if you are in a dream or if you ever even knew what a dream was to begin with.

My nurse “wakes” me up and tells me that my blood pressure has fallen to a shockingly low level and that my blood platelet count has dipped below the acceptable parts per million of blood cells in standard city tap water. This happens with chemo, which is why they take my vitals every 4 hours. It wasn’t an emergency, per se.  They didn’t need to break out the paddles, call the shaman or force feed me my last meal like a foie gras goose… But they did need to act right away. My memories of this are essentially diagonal because DRUGS, but as I understand it, they shoved some blood inside of me faster than if I were a vampire recently rescued from a deserted island.

This process took a bunch of hands-on work that didn’t allow me to to be asleep or still for more than an hour at a time from midnight until around 7am. I sort of remember all of this happening, but because DRUGS I’m still not sure how much of it was real and how much was a low blood-pressure-Ambien hallucination.

Even though I was nocturnally molested far more than usual that night, I still felt well rested and normal the next day. I’m not sure if it was because of the rejuvenating cuddles of the Ambien walrus’s soft pink arms,  the fact that breakfast every day consists of steroids (WHO WANTS TO TAKE THEIR SHIRTS OFF AND PUNCH EACH OTHER IN THE CHEST??), or that my RN was so good at her job that she was able to poke, prod, test, and pump me full of blood without disturbing me enough to destroy the productivity of a night’s rest. Whatever the reason, I consider it a net gain on my #Leuckiness. An inevitability happened and it was handled in a way that had almost no negative impact on me at all. That’s #Leuck.

I was up all night and got #Leucky.