When the night has come and the land is dark

the famous pie-eating contest scene from Stand by Me

My life has sunk to the level of one giant barf-o-rama. (I give credit to Stephen King, who may have been the first person to use the term in print in his novel/screen play Stand by Me. Great movie, incidentally.) I could throw away my clocks and tell time by  the onset of each cycle of cookie-tossing. It happens every half-hour, almost on the half-hour. The onset happens technically three minutes past each hour and half-hour..

Becca suggested Benadryl or Ativan. Benadryl might possibly work. Ativan wouldn't because it would knock me out. My initial dose was given at around 6:00 a.m., and the schedule, plus or minus an hour or less, needs to be maintained. I have to work after the dose.  I am trying Benadryl. I have nothing left to lose.

Starting tomorrow, we're going with injections instead of IV administration. This means  I no longer need a saline lock, and that I'll have a moderately painful intramuscular injection each day, but then will been done with it, minus the barfing and feeling horrible, until the next injection twenty-four hours later. I'm  glad to have the saline lock out of my hand, as it was inconvenient, though not so inconvenient as being hooked to an IV pole. Intramuscular injections are normally given in the hip, thigh, upper arm, or buttocks. My upper arm is too thin (the other parts are borderline, but they;ll have to do), so I'm limited to the other three. With having a left and a right of each, every six days I'll have to re-use each site. Twenty-four  more days of injections means each site will be injected four times. It's not optimal, but it's far better than either the oral or the IV alternatives. Anything resembling a workout is off the table for the next 3 1/2 weeks, but my level of energy is and probably will continue to be such that  it wouldn't have been possible anyway. Just dragging myself to work is almost more than I can handle.

I'm dreading with a capital D the psych rotation that follows my final week of pediatrics, which is to be spent in pediatric oncology.  Most of the psych rotation is spent among people who are not a lot crazier than you are or I am. Whether or not that is a good thing is something I'll leave for each reader to determine for himself or herself.  In almost every rotation, however, someone is attacked by a truly deranged patient. With my luck being what it is, I'm not overly optimistic.  I'll walk into whatever facility I'm assigned each day with the eyes in the back of my head fully functional.  I've worked as a substitute teacher in a middle school. I'll consider this job the equivalent of the sub teaching job times roughly 1000 in terms of the degree of danger.

Meanwhile,  I'm trying to barf enough today that there will be nothing left to throw up tomorrow, or at least it appears that I am spending sufficient time worshiping the porcelain goddess enough for such to happen, and I'm trying to put a positive spin on it. The pediatric oncology patients deserve my full attention tomorrow, or at least a decent uninterrupted game of chess or Candyland.

I hope the weekend has been enjoyable for everyone else. If you're a fantasy football participant, I hope your team did well. If church is your thing, I hope your musicians didn't screw up the hymns to the degree that it ruined the service for you, or that the pastor didn't ramble on and on about a topic that had no interest to you. If you live on the east coast, I hope that you were unaffected or at least minimally affected by Hurricane Matthew.

My brother is such a cretin that he considers the hurricane his personal hatchet man, and is rooting on the hurricane the way more sane (but sometimes still demented) people cheer for their sports teams. My mom, who is here for the week because someone for whom she covered is covering for her in return for 2 weeks, tried explaining to him that lives are at stake, and people stand to lose their homes and everything they own. "I'm really sorry for them," Matthew responded, seemingly in sincerity, then went on to shout encouragement each time another report of the hurricane came on the telly. I really hope his residency is on the east coast, right in the eye of some future hurricane, so that he can more fully understand his foolishness. Then again, we all knew of Matthew's cognitive challenges long before this hurricane became the precursor of a tropical storm, and foolishness of such magnitude is difficult even for the intelligent to grasp.