DAY 044 -- "And A White Noise Machine"

Here again, I’ve missed a few chronological days of blogging herein, though I haven’t adjusted the numbers. This is as it should be, because it mimics how my cancer and treatments have progressed: sometimes as scheduled, sometimes out of whack.

No matter. The truth is the truth, delivered in dribs or in drabs.

Big week coming up, with follow-up diagnostics, bloodwork, scans, oncologists.  This will show what’s happened to my cancer (or not) after weeks of chemotherapy and radiation.

Nervous? No more nervous than I was that time I was clutching a daisy between my toes and dangling upside-down from a cliff above a river full of ravenous alligators with my hair on fire.

Heading into the (first) stretch of healing, I’m still in the grip of the side effects:  Poor appetite, food that tastes like something between boiled cardboard noodles and fried dirt pancakes, liquids that swallow like a gritty burnt milkshake, and fatigue that hangs on me like a torn curtain in a half-collapsed proscenium (too much metaphor? Me, too, but I’m all about indulgence when I can get it lately).    

A better one might be that I feel like an Energizer tortoise in a fluctuating battery charger.

Or a rusty propeller beanie.

Or a clam.

Do you get the feeling that I’m trying to play for time?

I have noticed that I latch on to things now that feel like sources for hope and healing. Odd things. Pre-cancer, I wouldn’t have been so open for inspiration and deep meanings, but this disease does have a way of rerouting thought processes, even the ones that I long thought inflexible, if I thought about them at all.

For example, this pic of my dahlin’ Diane just eking out a couple inches more height than our garden zinnias, and they’re not through growing. Why does that now seem so significant to me? Well … if a flower can thrive and grow high as my sweetheart’s eye, so can I.

Or, when I spotted this truck in Wells River, Vermont.  Why, if Man can make a truck run on wood, I can make my body live without cancer. 

Weird logic?

No doubt, but I like thinking of it that way.

Or, this bedside night table that I now deem an insomniacal survival kit: Two water bottles, a back-up ginger ale, a radio-clock, reading glasses, a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle book, an antique heirloom stained glass lamp  and a white noise machine.

All directed at enhancing the healing.

More as we go, El