Second to last

Second to last: you may only have a second more to last in this world, what should you say? "I lo..." Or what?

Second to last: you may have gotten second to last place place, a very prestigious rank in an Ironman competition but pretty suck ass in a job interview featuring one other candudate.

Second to last: seems pretty good to consider I'll only have one more chemo treatment after today's. 

In three weeks.

yay? tiny yay spelled ok

Learned

I found out today that three weeks after my last chemo treatment I come back in to my oncologist so she can see how I'm doing, and also meet with my radiologist so she can set up my radiology appointments. It looks like it will be able to have those appointments over on MLK Boulevard which is much much much closer to where I live and that would be nice. I get to pick what time of day I have it because I'll have to come every single day Monday through Friday for 5 to 7 weeks. 

This is a bit of a conundrum...how does one pick a DAILY standing appointment? Without much of a scaffolding of a structure or scheme to fit it into, to nail it on to? To crucify it onto? If I worked full time I'd pick lunch hour. If I worked part time I'd pick a non work time. 

But you see, I'm in what you might think of as a kind of enviable time of life, where I don't really have much of a schedule, and I get to "focus on health and recuperation and relaxing" – but this is actually very disconcerting and upsetting and doesn't feel good. I don't like aimless days and hours and minutes and seconds and weeks and time and time and time. It depresses me and makes me feel like I'm nothing much with not much  purpose or even shape. I and the couch ooze together and have the same purpose and thoughts - stuffing, fuzziness, dullness, softly rectangularity, and stillness with no insight.

Thank god for the kids - they orient me, some.

How shall I spend my days. Watching soap operas and eating bonbons? Taking an art class? Substitute teaching at the junior high? Going out to lunch? My mother-in-law I really wants me to take the fancy jewelry making class. I don't think I fancy making fancy jewelry. A friend wants me to kind of coach her 19-year-old college student about time management, that sounds pretty good but I'm not quite sure when I can start or where. I like that idea though. Everyone and their dog, and the dog they rode in on, tells me to rest and recuperate and heal and just be kind to myself. What in the world does this actually mean! Recuperating and inhaling? I simply can't do this 24 hours a day, I will bore myself to death.

I also learned how they came up with the six-time regimen for the particular chemo regimen I'm on. (TAC) They used to do it for longer and longer cycles of time till the patients died. Suddenly one day they realized, oh my, it's not the cancer that's killing the patients, it's the chemo! So they experimented and experimented to see how long patients can last without croaking: about six times.That's nice. 

Other stuff:

Doctors can be so nonchalant. I asked her today why I was still feeling so queasy right up before the time when I had to start chemo again at the very time I should be JUST FINE. 

Here are the reasons she thinks it could be so:

1. Heartburn - take such and such

2. Pavolvian conditioning - she said "does the thought of me and coming here make you sick?" I had to confess that it wasn't really specifically her, since she doesn't sit around with me during chemo, but going there and sitting in that ugly room and smelling everything is kind of gross. And I'm also becoming oddly conditioned to not like my room, at home, and my brand-new chosen house. I don't like my bed I don't like my lamp I don't like the walls I think the room has a weird horrible smell that no one else can smell. Purely Pavlovian. Dr. G told me that that happened to her husband last year when he had colon cancer, so that when he was completely finished with everything they repainted the room got all new bed linens and curtains and stuff. We may have to do something like that too even though I like these bed linens. The whole thing kind of makes me ill. Maybe I am getting a bit mental.

I often write in the difficult and frowned upon second person. Why?

One of my adorable nurses changed her hair. It's a weave and I asked if it hurt her and she said not very much.

Chemo day so far:

Nice ride and company and lunch by Carrie - thank you! She brought snacks and two good books and Starbucks - a dear good friend.

Bleh feeling now.

A fancy dinner brought by Liz and her delightfully gourmet husband Clayton - roast, gravy, fancy green beans, potatoes - very nice. Hey! More tender than mine! Send secret.

Met a man today with fairly advanced tongue cancer. Cannot eat through mouth now. Met another tiny man today with stage four lymphoma. Overall I think I'm pretty lucky in the chemo room.

Taking a new heartburn pill that has side effects of arythmia, insomnia and a stiff non movable neck. Not delighted.

The Farm

The body is not really one organism. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals. But science is discovering more more than this is not the case. We are each more like a farm or microbome or microbio biological domicile or something. I don't think I have the scientific name correct. But our skin holds it in, and on the skin live billions and billions of other creatures, bugs that live in the pores of our eyelashes, bacteria that live in our mouth and throat and our esophagus and stomach and  intestines and all away through. We host tiny worms and bugs in our bloodstream and our bones and all over our bodies. 

And when any of the many communities on the farm get poisoned or rampaged, it upsets the whole ecosystem. That's why if you get antibiotics and they wipe out some of your gut bacteria you can messed up. Doctors are even now doing fecal implants for people that have dysentery that won't go away. Because the healthy poop can repopulate the unhealthy person's intestines with the right kind of bacteria. Isn't this amazingly fascinating? Disgusti-nating?

So how this relates to a cancer patient is when your body is flooded with a bunch of poisons it wreaks havoc on all types of stuff on the farm and then the farm's varying communities have to get out and retill their ground, get rid of their dead, make new workers, get new food, hospitalize and nurse their almost dead, rebuild their homes, and work ferociously to try to get back to normal - plus try to establish communication and trade with all of the other groups they depend on, serve, and deal with. Like a country after a natural disaster. Takes time to return to a state of homeostasis and health. 

So that's what I'm working on, that's my real project, although mostly occurs below my subconscious so I (meaning the "I" of our normal egotistical self-view) don't how to have much of an effect on it. I am no me. I am we. 

So it's more like my bacteria and cells and cute tiny worms and bugs are all floating belly up In a sea of poison flowing over them ruthlessly redly. Result: My farm is fucked up.

Reading 

I'm back in the mood to read a lot though, and I just read the collection of best stories of 2013, edited by Elizabeth Strout. I highly recommend that you read The Semplica Girl Diaries by George Saunders and the story called The World to Come whose author I cannot recall. The first one is absolutely hilarious in the beginning, got busting really funny commentary on being a parent raising kids fighting with your wife etc. etc., and then it shifts into a truly bizarre amazing concept that no one else has ever thought of, that came to Saunders in a dream. It in and itself is a scathing commentary in our commercialism and our ferocious seeking of prestige in our American culture. 

Next story is just so beautifully written, you'll find yourself drawn in to even if you don't think the subject matter sounds good, this is what happened to me. It starts off with a woman living alone in a cabin with her husband about 100 years ago or sometime in the 1880s or so out the middle of nowhere and how life was to dry and boring and they the same things every day. However it is observed with such beauty that evokes the countryside. A lonely woman makes friends with another wife grieving a lost child married to a work-driven quiet husbandeets a neighboring wife, and on weekly Sundat visits, they find sustenance and depth, iconnection, and real friendship in each other. Reminds me of a scene in The Hours movie, where Toni Colette comes next door to talk to her neighbor to tell her that she has to go to the hospital because she has breast cancer. The scene shows two women in that repressed time of the 50s were most housewives were pretty to look at but fake and repressed. Nobody really talks about what was real - but amazingly here in this scene the two neighbor moms looked at each other and talked about what was real for a second, and it seemed to be the only moment in either one of their lives when they could really be genuine, open, vulnerable, and themselves. They transcended and it was a moment of beauty and grace. There's real power to female friendship. Anyway I think this story captured it absolutely beautifully. Amazingly it was written by a man.

Now reading two good books at one time Brain on Fire and The Lowland. Both very engaging. Also ingesting lots of YA.

Recipes

What if you had a really long complicated recipe that you had made up from scratch it was a family favorite. Maybe chicken cacciatore, or some kind of fancy lasagna with truffle oil and mushrooms and oregano and spinach and five different kinds of cheeses and special noodles? Or maybe like a five layer cake with ganache and raspberry and with cream and chocolate and more whipped cream? Like it's kind of complicated?

Anyway when if you painstakingly wrote this beautiful long complicated recipe out by hand step by step by step by step. There are maybe 50 ingredients and 50 steps. Has to be done correctly.

Then what if you made 10 copies of it and send them out to your favorite aunts and cousins and friends? They each made it for their friends and their friends loved it in fact each of them had a big party and after the party everybody wanted a copy. So they each made copies of the copies that you made them. And then each person they got a copy and friends he wanted a copy, and so on and so forth. And your recipe was so amazing that it went around the world and there were 7 billion copies made? How do you think that 7 billionth copy would look woukd  it be legible or clear? This is what the cells in your body do every day. The recipe is copied over and over (DNA AND RNA). Mistakes are made. That's cancer. Cancer is just a recipe inside your cell that tells the daughter cells what to do when the cell divides. Each one of those daughter cells then does the same thing and so on and so on and so on millions and billions and millions of times in your life. Mistakes are made in everyone's body. Often times these messed up mistakes are killed or eaten. Sometimes they're not. That's cancer. It's probably happening in you right now, it's normal and often random.

Kids

One suffered such bad cedar fever I squeezed her in to her pedi yesterday and begged her to HELP US! This kid is so sick she's non functional and resorted to screaming while sneezing 157 times and rubbing her face bloody. Which made the other child freak out with annoyance flying tears and her own screams - a circus of hell. Hub was out of town, mommy starting chemo next day and not feeling sparkly. Dr. N helped - loaded her up with roids and sprays and meds - today 100% better. (Kid, not me). LOVE MY PEDIATRICIAN 

Little one shoved a staple under her fingermail at school - got it out. Now screams and fusses every 45 min that she is in dreadful pain and then hates our suggestions for relief. Repeat.

They still charm me.

Glad Mike is home.

Ms. Cunningham - coolest science teacher ever - brought two baby lambs to school today. With baby bottles.