DAY 040 -- "A Front Seat Driver"

Home again, home again! 

If it’s all the same to you, I’ll reserve the “jiggety-jig! part of that rhyme for when I’m back on the Harley with Diane.

Yes, I was sprung from the joint today! (I did this yesterday, beginning my Day 039 entry with dated gangster slang. Don’t ask me why.)

As a general rule (no, as a very specific rule), it’s a good idea to go home from the hospital asap. When you (and your doctors) determine that everything they’re doing for you in the hospital can be done at home? Vamoose!

Please don’t read that wrong. I love hospitals. I love doctors. Not all of either, but I've spent much of my professional life in those rooms and hallways and I know it's where the nasty little germies are. Who hasn’t been in a waiting room and looked at and listened to your fellow sickies, often an elbow away. Coughs, sneezes, and who knows what lurking on their surface areas or flying around the room.

No one should enter a hospital without a mask (Also see Day 039).

No, I’m not a germaphobe; I do go out amongst us on any given day without any sense of doom, but I’m also a realist. There may be sick people in a restaurant or a supermarket, but you KNOW there are sick people in a hospital. I mean, there’s that infected elbow, brushing yours …

Man, what a digression. I'm sorry. 

I didn’t get cancer from a contagious waiting room elbow.

But, I’m home with some new post-treatment rules, meds, directives. I’m in the grip of what many have told me will be the hardest part of this protocol, because the effects of radiation and chemotherapy linger and work beyond their cessation, so I’m still in suffering the side effects mode. This picture was taken this morning. Enough said there.

So, I’ll need a couple more weeks to come down from the hovering highs of low blows, then we’ll see what we’ll see next month back in scanville.

That’s what’s in my brain today:

After weeks of harsh daily insults to this body, what will they find in the follow-up diagnostics? Did it work? Did it half-work? Is the cancer gone? Is it lurking in the lymphs?

I’ll have to carry those unanswered questions with me for a while.

This is turning into a long road trip with a front seat driver in the passenger seat, and dammit it's going where I’m going, and it's eating all my snacks, and it insists on telling me horror stories. And now that we’re well down the road, I have to learn when to take the wheel, and when to let it drive and refuel while I rest.

More as we go, El

P.S. Oh! And I mentioned scalloped potatoes in yesterday's entry, and when Diane brought me home today, she had homemade scalloped potatoes waiting. I'm a lucky man.