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
