I’m sitting in the waiting room waiting to go in for my lung function test. It’s a pretty easy and benign test (I’ve done it before) but unfortunately my body seems to think that it’s here for chemo. And there is nothing that I can do to convince it otherwise.

I have the familiar taste in my mouth and the incessant knot in my stomach. I drove myself to this test so fortunately this feeling didn’t really start until I pulled into the garage. Otherwise had Christine come with me I probably would have started feeling sick as soon we got into the car and started to drive to Capitol Hill on a weekday afternoon. It’s happened to me before when we headed into downtown once. It was a weekend actually but there was something about the lighting, the time of day, and the traffic volume that told my body we were going in for chemo when in reality we weren’t.

The body’s response to these things is so interesting. Clearly it’s figured out the connection and that these treatments aren’t really “good” for me. And what’s fascinating is that it starts to react and protest at the slightest hint that we are going in. Normally if I was coming here for chemo I’d have taken some anti-anxiety medication to help combat it.

The medication is called lorazepam and it’s pretty powerful stuff. When I’m on it I’m lucid, and totally with it at any given point, but as we’ve discovered there is a good chance that I’m not going to remember much if anything afterward. It’s come up a few times for Christine and I when we’ve had to rehash a conversation that we’ve already had because we had it on a Wednesday night after I had chemo. Last night for example we were talking and I mentioned that we hadn’t started watching the new episodes of “The Biggest Loser” off the of DVR. Christine just stopped and stared at me. Apparently we watched it last week. On Wednesday. She tried to jog my memory for anything about the 2 hour program which I had apparently watched with great interest. I had nothing. After a few minutes I realized that I had vague memories, images really, of having watched it, but for the most part I can’t remember anything that happened on Wednesday from about 2pm on. Apparently I’m quite pleasant on the medication though. Engaged, talkative, and this week I even ate all of my vegetables with dinner.

It is a good drug, and I’m glad I have it to take as it makes going the hospital for chemo that much more bearable. But not today. This kind of took me by surprise, and there is nothing I can really do about it, but sit there and wait. On the plus side, like I said, it didn’t start until I pulled into the parking garage of the hospital. And then it intensified as soon as I got off the elevator and was hit by that hospital smell. It’s not that its a bad smell,  its just a distinct one that my body recognizes and has certain associations with.

Maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t always remember how it feels.