Fast facts (if you don’t have time to read the full post): THERE ARE ONLY FOUR CHEMO TREATMENTS LEFT! FOUR! One, I am very excited for this journey to end because chemo is kicking my ass. Two, I am depressed for this journey to end because it means not seeing my nurse friends once a week AND I am that much closer to getting my breasts chopped off. Yup, I lose both of my breasts in like six weeks, probably. F U C K. I know we all wanted to forget that horrifically sad detail.

TO THE LONG VERSION!

I was in 7th grade the first time I lost my big toe nails. I was trying out for the basketball team and I didn’t have sneakers and I thought the Nike sneakers my mom had were SO cool, so I wore those to tryouts. They were a grayish silver with a big red “N” on the side. Now that I am pondering this, I wonder if they were actually New Balances? Nike doesn’t put N’s on shoes…. well anyway. The thing is my mom is like at least a half size smaller than me in shoe sizes, which I did not factor into this decision. I just wanted to wear cool looking shoes, which by the way were not meant for sports. Basically the whole time in tryouts you are jumping and catching the ball and my toes kept slamming into the front of the shoe, ultimately damaging the nails and lifting them. I wore cool shoes for nothing because I ended up on like the C team I think and my nails began their nasty transformation of falling off. Womp womp.

Because I was a fucking weirdo (still am) I did my best to preserve my toe nails falling off. If you’ve never lost a toe nail, basically it lifts and a new nail will form underneath and it kind of just sits there like a weird turtle shell. And the new nail is so fascinating! Mine kind of reminded me of an oyster shell with those interesting waves and layers. Anyway, the old nail is basically dead and in my case, was still hanging on to the nail bed which I was fine with because it gave the illusion that I still had a fully formed toe nail. I remember the nail on my right toe was fully intact, but was hanging on like the cover of a book. I gently ended up removing it and well…. I was so impressed with myself that I saved my toe nail in a box for many years. I don’t know why I did that? It was a weird keepsake and it ended up finally meeting the trash can when I cleaned out my room before we moved after my senior year of high school.

I am now losing my big toe nails again and six of my ten finger nails are currently in various stages of falling off. I can see my right toe once again has almost fully lifted, along with my right thumb. The biggest differences from the experience I had in 7th grade and now are that I am not able to grow new nails right now since chemo is killing a lot of my cell growth and I also will NOT be keeping my nails when they fall off. I promise I will throw them away, but not until I have observed the shit out of them. I guess I am still a weird freaky kid. How often do you get to see your nails fall off intact?! It is a rarity indeed.

Okay all jokes aside, my nails are fucking nasty these days. Don’t look at my feet or my hands, please. I am disgraced! I feel like a puffer fish. My ER finger is looking better, but is still gross and leaky. Like last night it was especially leaky and I literally flexed my finger and strange juice came out of it. It squirted across the floor! It kind of looks like baby snot and smells like a dirty belly button. You know exactly what I am talking about. And if you don’t, you should touch your belly button right now.

I have lost most of the ability to button clothing, open containers, pick the black heads on my face, tie my shoes, pull my retainer out of my mouth, wash dishes, and pick the dead skin off my feet. Between the neuropathy in my fingers and my nails falling off, my hands feel rather useless to me now. The next four weeks are going to suck hard.

I just need to survive four more weeks.

Today’s song lyrics of the day are brought to you by the Bow Wow.

“They’re playing basketball (uh all around the world)
We love that basketball (uh to the beat y’all)
They’re playing basketball (let’s go, all around the world)
We love that basketball (this is so so dat)”

– Basketball (feat. Jermaine Dupri, Fabolous, & Fundisha), Bow Wow