I’m going to watch Monsters vs Aliens in 3D tomorrow, yay! Put on the funny glasses and laugh at Hugh Laurie’s cartoon voice and the President’s sureminded incompetence. Whee.

And maybe I can join the group as Micropiconano, of whom there is less each day. My superpower is that I can shrink! Slowly! And not entirely at will! (If you check my Google profile, though, my superpower is something else.)

I now weigh an incredible 42.8kg, according to my IKEA scale. Since this scale costs a red note, I suspect it’s slightly inaccurate so as to maintain its owner’s happiness. Nevertheless, I have been using it consistently for one year, and in that one year I have gone from coasting 47kg *shudders* to being even lighter than my secondary school self (although a different scale was used then).

The hospital scale makes no such pretensions to vanity and declares me a full kilogram heavier than I am at home. But it too shows a declining and more dramatic trend, because there was that one week I spent being a human sponge and retaining water, during which my weight hit 50kg (!!!). I didn’t know till then that it was possible to carry around 5 kg of water weight.

Anyway, I am shrinking, not that you’d know it to look at me. I’ve been trying to figure out where the lost mass came from, since it can’t be all tumour. As long as it’s fat being lost, I’m cool with it. I have fat tissue to spare.

Also, I hit upon a genius dressing idea today. I should organize my makeup by colour, since I am always forgetting what colours I own, as well as what shades go with which. I don’t buy sets, I buy separates so that I can get precisely the colours I want. This means that an “eyeshadow set” for me contains items from 2 or 3 different brands, and without some form of organization, I’d just never get around to the daunting task of actually using them.

I’d love to say that when I grow up, I’ll junk all my old makeup and start afresh with one brand, like M.A.C. that lets you put together your own colour sets. But I still have the little pot of lipgloss my cousin gave me for my 16th birthday (yes, ew, imagine the bacteria) so I don’t see that happening. Plus, you know, Shiseido makes brilliant eyeliners, Stila makes wonderful lipglosses, so I can’t be a one-brand woman where cosmetics are concerned.

I had a rare moment of freedom today. They decided to take me off the saline drip, since they’re no longer giving me intravenous antibiotics. So I was free to move around without lugging the IV machine around.

At 9pm, I decided I would like some deeleeshus Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. So I went outside to the nurses’ station and informed them that I was going to 7-11 to buy ice cream. Once they ascertained that I wasn’t going to faint or anything, they let me go.

It was a bit of a long walk because the 7-11 is all the way in the main building, but I made it there and back without incident. The only thing was, the 7-11 didn’t have Ben and Jerry’s in mini-tubs. They had them in big tubs but no way I can eat a whole pint by myself, and the only mini-tubs they had were Haagen-Dazs. Poot. I think that brand is posh for poshness’ sake, plus they only had strawberry and macadamia nut flavours. How how?

In the end I settled for a Cornetto. But it was a premium one okay, Cornetto Royale in Sweetheart Brownie. Quite nice la, but nothing can ever compare to a Ben and Jerry’s cone for me.

I never get to wander the corridors of NUH unaccompanied, so this is a first. Also, the hospital is pretty empty once everything closes and visiting hours end, so it’s nice and quiet and not many people are around to stare at this ice-cream maniac in pink hospital pajamas.

Later I am going to give my eyes some candy by watching Johnny Depp in Chocolat. A chickier chick flick can’t have been made, I think. Johnny Depp, in a film set in France, that most romantic of countries, in a tale about chocolate. Throw in some French haute couture and you’re set for 100% female approval liao.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane, to see how I had all the symptoms and I never picked up on the red flags.

The first symptom was a cough, which was innocent enough that it shouldn’t be worrying.

The next was the feeling of an obstruction in my throat, which got worse when I lay down. I even described it to several people as a “lump in my throat”, but we never picked up on the words I was using to describe it.

Then there was an unexplained arm pain that I thought was carpal tunnel, until it shot up into my shoulder and immobilised it for a day. I remember thinking that maybe, something is irritating the nerve but it never occurred to me to suspect an abnormal growth.

By this point, I had been to see the GP. If I’d had my wits around me, I’d have asked for an X-ray. But who goes to the GP for a cough and gets an X-ray instead? If I’d got the X-ray then, we could have caught it sooner, before it started squashing my heart.

Again, I wasn’t listening to myself when I went to see a TCM practitioner. Why is it that when people say “I found a lump in my breast” the first thought is to suspect a tumour, but I said “lump in my throat” and warning bells didn’t go off? Is it because cancers of the thoracic region don’t get as much media attention, or they’re just less scary, or the symptoms look so much like other things, whereas lumps in breasts are pretty clear-cut – what else could cause them, after all.

How do you have all these symptoms – lumpy feeling in throat, cough, and T-shirt collars getting tighter – and not think to look in the mirror and put them all together? I bet if I went to House’s medical team and described these symptoms, they’d all immediately guess it was a tumour and send me off for treatment. Okay, so I am not medically trained, but how does one miss those warning signs?

The take-home message? If you see, feel or suspect an abnormal mass, get it checked out ASAP. I couldn’t see or feel mine, so listen to yourself and the words you’re using to describe how you feel. “Something”, “a lump”, “an obstruction” – all these are red flags that demand at least an X-ray or some sort of diagnostic imaging.

I’m alive! Yes I know that’s fairly obvious, but when I stop blogging for a while people invariably wonder if I’ve succumbed to my cancer. Well, let me put it this way – I’m more likely to be suffering from the chemo than from the cancer.

This time around, the side effects were terrible – I suffered nausea for 3 days, and my daily caloric intake dropped to something like 600 calories a day because I was only eating Milo and crackers.

At first I thought it was just the solid food, but then the Campbell’s powdered soup I had for dinner made its reappearance at night. Then I figured maybe I shouldn’t lie down after eating, but apparently nausea is not affected by position – if it’s going to come back up, it will. So I can chalk it up to nothing more than “chemo side effects”, and we’ll just have to deal with it as it comes up (no pun intended, but now I’ve pointed it out).

My fingers are also tingling something awful. Sometimes when the nurses come in to take my blood pressure, I get irrationally afraid that the cuff will cut off blood supply and my fingers will drop off, because they’re tingling so bad.

I did not enjoy my CT scan – I found it a terribly long wait, as well as unnecessarily painful. The nurse didn’t find my vein the first time, so she was poking around a bit and causing me to go “eeep eep” until she gave up. The second attempt went in much more easily. And this time when they hooked up the IV plug to the contrast medium, it hurt as it flowed into my hand. It didn’t hurt the last time around, why is that?

The data differs as to the amount of shrinkage the tumour underwent. If you treat it as a flat rectangle, the tumour shrank quite a bit. On the other hand, it is NOT a flat rectangle, and the ward doctors said there was “minimal shrinkage”. That’s it la, the next time I’ll just do an X-ray. Faster, cheaper, easier and with no sacrifice on the accuracy of data – even their hi-tech CT machine can’t give me a solid number anyway.

The GBA slot on my DS seems to have failed, which means my previous games have all gone to waste – not that I really mind, since my DS slot solution is working just fine and all those games were really old anyway. I already finished up all the Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice and Professor Layton games so they’re just staying there as some sort of archive. I’m back to playing Nintendogs. Rune Factory 2 isn’t a game I can play for hours (can’t watch plants grow all day) and I don’t have any other games in progress, having given up on the secret chapters of The World Ends With You. I might start Lost in Blue 3 sometime, just to see how it’s an improvement over the second instalment.

When there’s nothing to watch on the TV in your hospital room, because cartoons are too stupid and Channel News Asia repeats itself every 2 hours, and you’re too tired to sit up and use the computer and anyway the tubes sort of get in the way of your typing, you’re left with nothing but reading books (words ugh wooooooords) and playing DS. And because ‘chemo brain’ means I have a terribly short attention span, reading is kinda out of the equation.

Because apart from the tiredness and the nausea, the biggest enemy I have to fight during chemo is tedium. The absolute boredom of sitting there waiting for drugs to drip into my system. And as with most things, the closer you are to the finish line, the more unbearable the waiting gets. Which is why I desperately need distracting games on the DS to keep me from going round the corner and up the wall. Grrr.

I never get this bored or restless when I’m off chemo, probably because I have more space and diversions AND NO NAUSEA.