Advice is only as good as the person giving it is like you, or, if they are not actually like you, then at least can pretend to be like you. If you’ve read the material in the rest of this book, and if you know yourself well at all, then you should be able to gauge whether or not what I have to say here will be of any value to you. It is the advice that I have boiled down from my experience with cancer.
A) Don’t be stupid: take it easy. You have nothing to prove. I got out and cleared the leaf litter that had gathered under my car, and all that I accomplished was irritating the PICC line. It ended up costing my caregivers more resources to get that mistake fixed than if I had just left the leaves for later (or ever). No, you don’t have to be a lump, but learning to live within your new reasonable limits will help the other people who are trying to help you.
B) Go to a medical supply store and buy a shower sleeve (to cover the PICC line) made from thick plastic, not the thin stuff (i.e., not like sandwich bag material). Cut the glove part off. (Use it to make a puppet or something.) When you go to shower, you can just tape around the ends of the tube. If you cover the PICC line with a couple of layers’ worth of woven bandage before putting the tube on, that will absorb any small amount of water that seeps in at the ends, and you can just change that cloth when you dry off. The best kind of tape for wrapping the ends is cohesive bandage (although watch out for latex allergies with some products): it sticks to itself and not to your skin, it dries out well overnight, and it provides compression that helps to keep the water out.
Don’t use one of those deflatable shower sleeves. It stinks both literally and figuratively. It’s heavy rubber. The lower sleeve cuff fits okay because it’s small, but the upper sleeve has to be loose enough to be drawn over the bandage and PICC lines, and once it is in place it doesn’t remain sealed when you have to move that arm. Plus you have to be careful not to inflate the thing so tightly that you break the PICC materials.
C) Get a supply of unscented baby wipes.
D) Don’t eat the ingredients of organic sandpaper, such as tortilla chips.
E) Get a dental cleaning and any other tooth work done before you start in on chemo. You won’t be able to do it during. This is additionally important because you might have occasional episodes where every nerve in your body feels like it is registering significant pain, especially any particularly sensitive nerves that you might have in your teeth.
F) Keep a journal. (I was only able to make myself do that for about three months, but it was worth it.)
G) Adapt flexibly.