I’m exhausted and I’m suddenly deluged with translation work and today was J’s birthday, which was super fun. Birthday Season has now come to a close for us. It lasts from December through March (with a slight lull at the beginning of the year). I’m not sorry to say goodbye to all the sweets.

Seeing my aunts and uncles and cousins yesterday was restorative and made me feel solid again. My cousin A gives the biggest, strongest bear hugs imaginable. They enfold you and squeeze hard, and like a blood pressure cuff, they continue to squeeze. I love those hugs. I told A yesterday that they are more like a hugging meditation.

I’ll be working on deadline for a television program all day tomorrow, so I’m trying to get to bed early. Just took all those pills in a single swallow. I think I have managed up to seven or eight at a time when my situation has required it. And earlier today, I took my two Tafinlars with no water at all. I’m a virtuoso pill swallower, definitely beyond the intro class (I even just learned a new trick on my phone’s meds app). The other day I was at Dr P’s office for a checkup, and I asked her offhand if there was any harm in swallowing all of my pills at once. She said there wasn’t.

And so I do. I swig water and they all go down the hatch, and as I’m falling asleep I imagine their breakdown and their course through my bloodstream to do their specific work. Three of them penetrate the blood-brain barrier, and keep my tumors from growing. One keeps my digestive system from going haywire in response to the other three. 

And one of them is just plain old Tylenol. My back hurts a little, but the real reason I’m taking it is, last night I didn’t sleep so well, and tonight needs to be different. It may have already been proven effective against existential dread, but I haven’t followed up lately to make sure. On the off chance this was proven wrong, I am not sure I want to know. The closer we get to April, month of my diagnosis in 2013 and my brain metastases in 2015, I guess I get a little nervous. (“What good is cancer in April? / No good at all,” foreshadowed Lou Reed.)

The cat figurine on the nightstand showed up sometime in the past couple of days, and it also seems to be on the lookout for existential dread, so I’ll keep it there for now.