As Secreatry Sage has indicated elsewhere on this venue, the treatment regimine for my cancer has been, of late, locked into a three-day period in which the medical bone-rattlers and soothsayers pump chemicals into my veins that are carcinogenic on their own as well as poisonous - so much so that they have to observe special rules for handling the stuff. I cannot speak for anyone else, but when they begin each new "course" of treatments, I almost immediately get a nasty, bilious taste in the back of my throat that simply grows more and more pronounced and widespread with each succeeding day of the three-day process in which they repeat the imposition of what I call my "poison cocktail." Before they inject the first of these vile substances, they administer medication they claim will help "control the nausea."

IT DOESN'T WORK!!!!!!

If anything, it fine-tunes the waves of nausea that rip through me for the next ten days or so. Were nausea and vomiting works of art, I would have provided the entirety of mankind with masterpieces to challenges the likes of Degas, Michaelangelo, Dali, Rembrant, Van Gough, Remington, Gaugin and all other artistic masters alive and deceased. Those tsunamis of tummy tumbling and tongue toasting sweep across me like the palettes of all master artists in one throat-filling, head-ducking over a porcelain receptacle moment of glorious illness.

Then the REAL fun starts.

In an effort to prevent a recurrence of an earlier episode that wiped me out and left me hospitalized with as many ailments and complaints as it took to wipe out my dearly departed great Aunt Agnes. Agnes was so bad that she wouldn't attend funerals for fear they would mistake her for the real departed one. It would have been an easy mistake to make. So it was with me that first time. You name it: anemia, dehydration, malnutrion, neutropenic, feverish, infected, atrophied muscles, hypoglaecemia... if I didn't have it diagnosed, it was only because medical schools hadn't been taught about it yet. I think one of the residents thought he would be cute and indicated he saw symptoms of early menopause. I went through three highly embarassing days of Hell at his expense. That's ok, he asked me about what to bring to a tax audit and I told him he was absolutely required to have a current protoscope with him! One does not play practical jokes on a master of them without personal peril .

In a well-intentioned (I hope) effort to help alleviate these horrific symptoms that all peaked on approximately the tenth day follow the last chemotherapy treatment (easy math here, even for Bunnyhunny) or the thirteenth day following the start of the process, my Death Doctor (Oncologist), Herman the Hun, decided he would start giving me Human Growth Hormone injections. Now, far be it from me to second guess anyone with a whole buncha letters behind his name, sorta like the model number of a good Eye-talian sports car, donchano? But, boy, howdy I just am still not all that convinced that was such a good trail to put the coon dawg on. The first time outta the chute, he gave me one whopper of an injection and sent me home for approximtely three days of Olympic class ralphing and one-armed commode-hugging. Then I began to improve somewhat. Some foods actually began to taste the way I remembered them tasting again. I endured an approximately 15 day period of total panic and mourning when CHOCOLATE made me sick as a turpentined hound dawg, but - thankfully - that passed eventually.

If you are ill and don't think you can feel muc worse, let a gummint bureaucrat get his or her disgusting little, non-capable-of-independent-thought fingers into your biscuit dough. These folks cannot understand the concept of the improbability of a soup sandwich, much less more evolved concepts such as human life and rational thought processes. Thanks to some equal-opportunity-but-unqualified-by-education-experiemce-or demonstrable-brain-activity who just happened to be the right minority du jour (in this case, she was hitting on two cylinders), I was no longer allowed to have the SINGLE INJECTION that would make me ill for three days or so and then allow me to have about 6-8 days of respite. She was from the gummint, and she was here to he'p me. She determined, based on her infinitely superior medical knowledge, that I should be injected with another substance, similar in purpose but with a few minor differences. One of these is that each successfive injection intensified the nausea and illness I was already suffering and added new patinas of technicolor barely withheld barfdom that eventually lead me clomp-stomping my way to the throne room of the hovel so that I could kneel in glorious musical tribute to the porcelain gods of blue water, odd stains one does not question for fear of discovering their origin and clockwise swirls of dismissal. These different injections were required to be administered for each of the next ten consecutive days. This was a massively hilarious prank worthy of Old Scratch himself.

Now I faced an additional seven days of weakness, nausea and loss of appetite following the "thirteenth day, but all the days in between were now as bad as the previous "thirteenth day" symptoms. Our tax dollars are at work and showing up in the sewer system of Smalltown, Georgia, U. S. of friggin' A. thanks to my unwanted, unasked-for, ebonics-speaking medical adviser. WOrse yet, following the third round of chemotherapy, I would up back in the hospital, my body again depleted of energy, intestinal contents and red and white blood cells, again dehydrated with congested lungs... but I was a good little government operated automaton. I got a few days break and we began the fourth round of poison-me-putrid and followed once again with the gummint mandated ten shots for ten days and, sure enough - on the thirteeenth day following the begining of my "life saving(?)treatments, I would up back in the confines of Our Lady of G-48 hospital where I was once again treated to a blood technician who had just been told not to put Betadine or Iodine on me wiping a Betadine swab on my wrist. At leats he reacted quickly, facing up to his error and taking rapid fire corrective measures that limited my reaction to a few minutes of convulsions and a brief period of non-respirating. At least he had the dignity, courtesy and decency to come back later to check on my condition and to again apologize for his error.

It is now late on Thursday afternoon and I have just now returned from my latest dance with the devils of the fifth floor nurse's station. I won't bore you folks with the tale of a five-and-one-half hour wait in midday August Georgia sunlight for transportation home. Hell, if I hadn't lived through it, I probably wouldn't believe that story either.

I am ensconced before my computer, well- lined trash basket at my side and have attempted to bring everyone here up to date on my condition. I have approximately four to six more ays of feeling as if death might be a rational alternative and trying to swallow early young sweet peas (one of my favorite foods) that taste as if they were prepared in dirty diesel fuel. Poor Secretary Sage tries so hard to find something - ANYTHING - that might intice me to swallow even a bite or two, but to no avail. I make the game effort, but it usually winds up tasting like the game left a taste on my tongue that is truly an act of rudeness.

Now, if I can endure what I just described and still find a way to let my friends know I care... WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM?!?!?!?!?

DOn't teell us that you don't have anything to talk about of interest to anyone else. You just finished reading this, didn't you? You may react to it, add to it, commisserate with me over what I have endured or you can tell us similar tales of what is happening in your real world life.

Just where the Hell do you folks think I find my material for LAF LIONS? All of them have some basis in real world events.