I’ll lead with tomorrow, since today is getting blurry already. I should be asleep already. The few hours that await me, since I’ve had to up my Decadron dose due to swollen optic nerves that never would have been detected were it not for my visit to the retina specialist yesterday to follow up on a condition initially caused by my cancer meds. (The dominos fall in more than one direction. It’s confusing.)

Tomorrow I’ll see Dr P. I haven’t seen her since my scans of last week, which resulted in so much drama. The CT scans are fine, though, so I have that to go on. I have that, and I cling to it, because I also have some kind of chest cold developing with bad cough, a sudden pallor that concerns me, extreme fatigue (most likely thanks to Keppra) and as of earlier this evening, a very slight fever. I usually run pretty cold – around 97 degrees – so for me, 99.1 is possibly cause for more concern than in warmer-blooded specimens. I have a sister in melanoma meds in Northern Ireland, who has suffered greatly from fevers on the same combo therapy I have, so I’m definitely on alert.

Tomorrow I’ll also be dropping off a baby gift for Nurse Practitioner R, who had a baby boy a few weeks ago. When I need to buy baby gifts, I never stray from books. Registry items feel practical, but having been through the process a couple of times, I know how quickly needs change, how intractable newborns can be when it comes to what swaddling methods they adore or reject, etc etc. Books are always the right size. And you can read them to a baby starting in the potted plant stage and then keep on reading them, until they start reading them back to you. I picked out some of our favorites.

And now, since it is November and since at the start of the month, when I felt fresh and new and ten pounds lighter and much less tired, I committed (with a couple of friends on Facebook) to starting a new poem each day of the month (to counter the novels that others attempt to write this month), I am thinking about Nurse Practitioner R, and her roles and how they intersect and how they emphatically don’t. I haven’t written my daily poem yet today (though I’m trying to go easy on myself now that I’m sick again), so I’ll try to ruminate here a bit, with a prose poem.

(Nurse, Practitioner, Mom)

From one day to the next you crossed that line – bump on the inside to human on the outside. The slap of his wet skin against your own, the way he burrowed in and found home. Nurse. Do you use that word to describe the rooting, latching, let-down and release?          

Or does the word itself jump you right back into your other self, the white-clad, purposeful, authoritative boots striding hallways to find the next one needing help, picking up the phone extension to find the next weak voice on the line needing your sure tones, your “it’s gonna be okay, hon,” your “we’ve got this.”      

Tomorrow, I won’t see you. You’ll be with him. Your colleagues know, and you know, my disease. Now, I think I know something about you. You and the little he, will I think of, adrift on an oxytocin sea, quilt of snuggles and snoozes and bleary trips for coffee. I wish you the best of care. I won’t call you Nurse, I’ll think of you as Mom, until I see you walk the halls again, knowing the way the scale tips, the way you get back one part, but leave another part, of your heart, at home or at daycare.

 

How do they keep screwing up and how do I cope? That’s what I’d like to know.

This morning started early, as mornings tend to do for me when I’m on steroids. 4 a.m., the hour of 30 year olds. (Except I’m pushing 44.) A couple of looooooong Decadron-fueled emails later, it was 7 a.m. The day dawned suddenly, because I had been hiding under my blanket with my phone so as not to wake J. When I peeled back the covers, presto!

My objective for the morning was to see the retina specialist, Dr. T. I’d seen him at the beginning of October, when things were a lot worse with my vision. I had lots of floaters, random flashes, the works. In fact, my left eye had shown some swelling in the retina, so I’ve been on a regimen of a couple different eye drops all this time. I never thought I’d get good at eye drop placement. Turns out you know you’ve gotten good at it when they make your eyes sting first thing. So for six weeks – actually longer – I’ve been faithfully heeding the rattlesnake-like pill-bottle-shaking sound alert of my meds app (which I have mastered and highly recommend to anyone who may need such a thing, may you never) and putting drops in my eyes seven times a day.

Last Friday, Dr. D (the ophthalmologist) said things were looking okay, but I think he was so freaked out by the fact I was seeing him two days after brain surgery (and that I was so sanguine about that) may have distracted him a bit. He and Dr. T work at a clinic together on Friday afternoons, though, so they were able to have a word about me.

Turns out my retina today looked GREAT. No swelling at all. Of course, in addition to the steroid eye drops, I’m also taking oral steroids, so that may be skewing things. I’m seeing Dr. T again in three weeks.

Something strange he noticed today, though, which he hadn’t the last time, is that my optic nerves seem to be swollen. He was concerned about this, so I had him call Nurse Practitioner A who works with my neurosurgeon, Dr. K. He amazingly got her on the phone and even though he wasn’t able to reach Dr. K right then, it felt so good to know my practitioners talk to each other and give out each others cell phone numbers and genuinely want to figure out what is going on with me. My hunch, which is not yet confirmed, is that the swelling of the optic nerves is a side effect of the gamma knife surgery. I’m hoping that is all it is.

I’m hoping there is nothing more to it, because my dance card is full this week. No more time to schedule extra doctor’s appointments. Tomorrow I’m seeing my therapist, M. Wednesday I see Dr. P. And it’s a short week. And THANKSGIVING – which I remember so fondly from last year as The Day I Could Eat Again.

I’m also hoping nothing further is wrong because when I went to pick up refills of my eye drops, the ones I’ve been using for weeks and need to continue using (albeit in smaller doses), the pharmacy once again was charging me a very high price for two tiny bottles of eye drops. The last time this happened, I spent two hours on the phone with our health insurance, and once hung up sobbing.

So I came back home and got on the phone. Except this time I’m on Decadron. No tears. I was borderline belligerent. The guy on the phone was baffled. And “senior resolution specialist Larry” has not called me back yet. Which means I don’t have my meds. Should I have overpaid $30 for my precious eye drops? If it were merely a question of time versus money (which it so often is, especially in NYC), perhaps I might have been okay with that, and I would have gotten my drops and put them in and had a longer nap. BUT THIS IS NOT THE ISSUE. This is some internal issue with my insurance, the last time around they apparently did a manual override of it, and I guess they expect I will be fine with manual overrides for time immemorial. They are incorrect about that.

I think it’s time to take a step back and realize I’ve actually been out of one of the drops since last Friday, and haven’t gone blind yet. And I still have the other kind. I have 30 minutes before I need to get the kids (and head into dinner prep, HOPEFULLY no homework this short week) and prepare for a solo evening with them so J can play basketball. So I’m not going to call the toll free number to be put on hold for another 30 minutes while they locate Larry, the senior resolution specialist, who has probably been hiding out in the john all afternoon waiting for the day to end, because he suffers from extreme job dissatisfaction, has nightmares about manual overrides in which he actually has to do manual labor to get them to work, and then his wife complains because he can’t seem to peel himself off the armchair after dinner to help out with the baby.

This is not to say I am cultivating even a shred of empathy for Larry in his official function, because… see dogs up there?

SERENITY NOW. (Or a restraining order later.)

PS I like to think I’m kind of funny on Decadron.

The pills are the same. I’m back on Decadron and Keppra and so far I’ve been using my leftover stash from earlier this year. So I know the pills are the same.

What is not the same? Their effect on me. I’m not the loquacious, outgoing Decadron Girl. I think that’s the difference in dosage – at the start of my last round I was on as much as 30 mg a day – and one day I even got 100 mg. This time around, I take 2 mg in the morning and 2 mg in the evening. What that seems to yield is tightness in my chest, a powerfully loud yelling voice when my kids don’t snap to it, and a terror of going to sleep at night, since I know I’ll be wide awake by 5:30 a.m., then totally useless all morning.

So I have to discover new ways of coping, scheduling, avoiding, maneuvering. With any luck, things will go as planned and I’ll be back off the Decadron and the Keppra by December 7. With less luck, more of these things, new meds, more surgery, and a slow slide back into medical limbo.

I have no reason to think things will get bad again. But I watched my wedding video with the kids yesterday, because they wanted to see it, and I couldn’t believe how naïve that bride was. She was expecting that the tremendous luck that brought her to that happy occasion would follow her forever. Perhaps it has, perhaps it has, but now instead of Lady Luck, robed in satin, Mr. Luck who accompanies me now is a bit down at the mouth, foul-mouthed, not exactly bitter, but close to it.

I know – I’m lucky. The disease I have can strike those younger and more vigorous than me down like lightning. I’d love to return to who I was even a week ago – before the most recent scan, when I was all about progress and exerting control and getting things “back.” Maybe it is time at last to acknowledge there is no getting things back. Things can be different, not the same. Young A asked last night for the anti-bad dream spray again, after weeks of not needing it. I asked him why. He said, “The room is shaking again.” I suggested it was just footsteps from upstairs, or his brother in the top bunk. No, he was very clear. The room shakes.

This is, I think, his way of worrying about me. He’s tuned into me like a radio and when things start going badly, he knows. He’s my canary. He’s my sensor.

He was up again at 5:30 this morning, asking me to find his blankie and claiming he had already looked in “the gap,” the space between his bed and the wall that swallows all of his necessary items when it’s dark. There it was, right in the gap, as I predicted. I couldn’t even be angry at him for waking me, because I’d been awake already. I left the blankie on his pillow while he used the bathroom, then returned to my bed to toss and turn.

I slept from midnight to almost 7 a.m. last night. It was a struggle, though. I didn’t check the clock but I’m pretty sure the last three or four hours I had to keep convincing myself it wasn’t yet time. The night before I’d kept an hour-long vigil in the bathroom with a night light on because I couldn’t sleep. Not a comfy place to sit and not something worth repeating.

My aunt V reminded my mom that I haven’t said anything about the CT scan results. Sorry!! The MRI news kind of eclipsed that. I spoke to Dr P on the phone the night before surgery, and she proclaimed my CT scans “beautiful.” So there’s that, at least.

In other news, until now I have been taking my combo therapy of dabrafenib and trametinib every other day. No longer. Now I need to toe the line and be a good cancer patient who takes her meds every day. This is an inconvenience, since it requires careful timing of when I eat and don’t – basically, a three-hour window of not eating (or drinking anything but water) twice a day. That sounds easy in theory, but it actually isn’t. You know what sounds even harder than that, though? Being dead. So, onwards to new meds regimen, and I will try to keep my complaints to a minimum, because There But For the Grace of Big Pharma Go I.

And now to complain about Decadron (steroid) and Keppra (anti-seizure med), which I have done at such length here before. I’m back on both. Hopefully short-term. But this time I’m having none of the fun I had on Decadron last time. It’s not making me gregarious. It’s making me cranky and mean. I instantly have next to no tolerance for my kids, so it’s a really good thing Mom has been here this week. Young A came in this morning to show me a Lego car he’d built, and I hijacked it and held him close and told him I’d have to be back on the medicine for a while that makes me cranky, but that he should know that I love him so much. He seemed to understand. How that will express itself remains to be seen. Maybe he’ll get even more hyper than he was before leaving for school today. Hard to say. I know they know I love them. But this medication makes it truly hard to control my rage when it so much as pokes its head out of the hole.

So I’m back in my bedroom/cave, pissed off at my situation, annoyed that in what seems like minutes since I’ve been back on steroids I have gained back four pounds already, horrified by what continues happening in the world – especially the non-picture-postcard parts of it – and trying to cope with being simultaneously sleepy and wired and aggressive and apathetic. It’s quite a cocktail. Did I mention they seem to have used extra lidocaine on my head when they were affixing the frame to it the other day? My head feels like a huge balloon on a string, tender to the touch, swollen, unsightly, addled.

All of this should contribute to my being very questionable company when J and I go out for dinner tomorrow to celebrate eleven years of married bliss. J, I will try to keep my mouth shut, and to smile. In case I screw everything up and start a fight or start crying or something, know that I love you. You are my steadfast life force and I can’t imagine dealing with any of this without your constant strength by me.

And now to face the day. I have to visit my ophthalmologist, Dr D. It’s been a while, and my eye concerns seem to be something I have always had. They were better for a while, now things are worse. And he doesn’t know about the surgery. The extremely long wait in his office means my eating and drinking moratorium should pass quickly, but I fear he will want to dilate my pupils, adding hours on to the affair. Nothing to do but roll with it. I hope I can.

Up like a bolt at 4:30 today when my alarm rang. Despite going to sleep at 11:30 (because I was waiting to see Mom when she arrived), I felt pretty rested. Good thing, since I took 2 mg of Decadron last night. I’m experimenting this time around with taking it earlier in the evening, around 7 pm, to see if that helps with the sleeplessness. I’m experienced now.

Waiting for the car we called, I looked out and saw things I would not have noticed if I were not up at that hour. A thin rib of golden leaves still clinging to the nearly-nude ginkgo tree out front. Our neighbor waved as he passed, walking his fluffy, adorable Samoyed, Onslow, way before sunrise (mental note: another reason not to get a dog).

This early time of day plus hospital still calls to mind more Labor & Delivery than cancer surgery. Though I’ve been up this early for surgery once before, of course – just this past June. I enjoyed my ride in the gamma knife machine that time perhaps too much, so now I’m going again. Maybe I grasped some titanium ring and no one told me that that meant another ride.

Even though I was going into this knowing the entire process, I still didn’t quite attain the degree of performative spectacle that came naturally to one of my sisters in melanoma, Kate Boone, who has cheekily bedecked her titanium frame with garlands, sparkly things, and lights. I didn’t really have much time to plan, this time around. I did, however, make the same tired joke the neurosurgeon and the nurses probably hear all the time as they are affixing frames to people’s skulls, tightly: “So… is that a Phillips head or a flat head?” (One of the nurses snorted. It was enough for me.) After that, it was no joke. It really actually hurts when you are jabbed with two needles in the forehead and two on the back of your head, and then screws get tightened and tightened beyond belief and you can feel some blood squirting out as they affix your titanium crown. Here’s me today (no blood!):

There were a couple of innovations today. The thing under my nose – I definitely didn’t remember that from last time, and neither did J. The green cloth around me – apparently to give me some privacy. Totally not effective, and who cares if anyone stares? We are in a hospital and I have a titanium frame bolted to my skull. What of it, good sir?

Things went much more quickly when I stated my intention to not have any sedation today. I did take the Ativan that melted under my tongue, but I didn’t get anything through the IV except contrast during the MRI before surgery. My refusal of sedation helped me jump the queue to first (there were three in line for gamma knife today). I almost leapt from the gurney when I heard I was first.

This reminded me of showing up to labor & delivery when Young J was about to be born. I had quietly and painlessly dilated to 8 cm and was told by my OB to tell the nurse on duty I’d been having “cramps.” I had not been having cramps. But being that far along, with fake “cramps,” meant I got in before everyone there to be induced, and within about three and a half hours, I had a baby on the outside. I don’t know if living in New York City has made me extra attuned to opportunities to jump the queue, but it can’t be discounted…

Today, we arrived at the hospital at 5:30 a.m., I registered with the lovely British-accented trans person who works registering people at 5 a.m. (I remembered them from last time). And by 9 a.m. we were on the outside of the hospital, me with a gauze-wrapped head like I’d been in a bar fight, stepping into a cab. No baby to show for it, but hopefully, we killed something bad on the inside.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…

I missed the call from Dr K this morning because I was at a class at the gym. I went to the gym this morning because I had had a good night of sleep, untroubled sleep, and because if I’d stayed home I might have fallen prey to more sleep, bad TV, and/or bad eating. I made a good choice, which when I saw I’d missed the call became a bad choice. I don’t have a direct number for Dr K. Also my phone lately plays this game where it periodically erases all of my most frequently called numbers. It stops recognizing J, or my parents. So I found the number for Dr K’s scheduler and left a message with her.

Dr K called me back when I was in the produce section of the food coop, which has spotty phone signal, and I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. So she wound up hearing this news before anyone else. And I wound up getting the news while staying in one spot, by the produce case, so I wouldn’t lose the call. I was plucking mushrooms from the bin and they felt very sticky. The produce sprayers cycled on and off a few times, misting me.

Dr K consulted with several people (including Dr P) and the consensus is to avoid invasive surgery, because it’s pretty far inside the brain. So I’m having gamma knife surgery again. Tomorrow!

This means I have to go back on the evil twins, Keppra and Decadron. (I don’t know if this means I can’t drive… but that’s really beside the point right now.) I know I’ll be exhausted (Keppra) and sleepless and manic (Decadron) for a while. I had the leftovers from last time all ready to go, in my closet of meds. This time I am determined not to let that send me into a downward spiral. Good luck to me.

I am a little excited to get gamma knife again. I know it sounds weird, but you should be used to that from me by now. This time I’m feeling much better overall, don’t have my period, and most importantly – I already know what gamma knife is like. I’m going to make a better playlist this time. Something more uptempo than Satie. Ska, maybe.

I wanted a ringing endorsement of the state of my brain. I don’t have it, yet.

Back in September, Dr K saw that while all of the tumors had continued to shrink, one of them had some bleeding surrounding it. He said that sometimes tumors do that as they are dying.

Today, that same spot, there was a lot more bleeding and swelling. The limitations of imaging mean that when blood is present, it obfuscates what is behind it. Dr K said that this presents two options, either a second round of gamma knife aimed at the spot, or else actual, invasive surgery on the brain to remove what is there. The risks for the latter include possibility of infection, as well as the possibility that a nearby blood vessel, which controls the movement of the foot, could be affected.

He’s going to talk to Dr P about this and call me tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m not crying – maybe that will come later after some beer. I’m mostly kind of pissed off! But, I’m sitting in Bryant Park for a few minutes, a place I love and often come to at times like this. It is the park of my uncertainty. And it has great trees.

I’m sitting in the hospital’s living room, or as close to it as you can get. I am typing with one swiping left thumb, because my right arm has an IV that is gift-wrapped for its next use, in an hour’s time. Every scan day is the same in that nothing and everything is the same. Today I had my MRI at the hospital instead of at the outpatient facility up the avenue. Today I waited for the crosstown bus and today again it left me a whole avenue away and as I approached the hospital’s main entrance I found myself in a passive aggressive race walk with a smartphoning doctor who was still determined to enter before me. In the end I let him win.

Today everything is later, meaning I could eat breakfast, lots of it, but am now fasting at lunchtime. The kids are going to aftercare today, which they haven’t yet done this school year, and I think that this concerns them more than the fact that Mom had/has/may no longer have cancer. They like their routines.

Directly from my CT scan, I’ll see Dr K, the neurosurgeon, who doesn’t like to wait until the ink dries on MRIs – he wants to give you results right away. I appreciate instant gratification – always have. But Dr K seems like a Highly Efficient Human, and as such I find him highly intimidating, for all of his Canadian affability. But it will be good to go home knowing my brain is – hopefully – well.

I’ll have to wait until Wednesday to find out from Dr P about the rest of me. 

I feel I should write this quickly, before the good memories recede in a more permanent way. As it is, I don’t have any of my own photos to share – my first trip to Paris, a solo one, is entombed in a photo album somewhere in the apartment that I can’t divine. (My second trip, my 30th birthday present from J, was recorded digitally and enshrined in a place we thought would be accessible long-term. Nope.)

The first trip: Crêpes bought expressly to warm my hands, a toy toaster purchased at Galéries Lafayette for my then two year old nephew (who is now 20), being told “Mademoiselle est très gourmande!” by my table companion, a stranger, at Chartier, because it was lunchtime and I didn’t skip a course, the youth hostel I was too old to stay in and the ridiculous union suit I used as pj’s which made using the coed bathroom infinitely more difficult. The hot chocolate and baguettes for breakfast at the hostel. The need to lock everything up when I left for the day, and the dread on my last night when my bunkmate discovered bedbugs in her sleeping bag. My outing to Théâtre de la Ville to see a modern dance performance, and my starving belly when I came out and realized Paris was not a place for late-night dining (or at least it wasn’t then), and my subsequent discovery of Pizzeria Karaoke in the Bastille, which, by the hour I got there was mostly bad neighborhood disco, but they decided to serve me a pizza anyways, which I consumed as drunk patrons staggered out of the disco in the back, groping each other, barely registering anyone in the dining room (I was the only one). My pilgrimage to Pause Café, which I knew from the movie Chacun cherche son chat, and where I sat with a beer and a soup to write my postcards. The bistro nearby where I stopped for a proper dinner another night, eating a plate of salmon so exquisite I asked the waiter how it was prepared, not expecting he would drop everything and stand by my table for a full ten minutes giving the play-by-play, which exceeded by far my French comprehension (and I studied it for twelve years). My night at Théâtre de la Huchette, known for its long run of an absurdist play by Ionesco, The Bald Soprano, which I had read for a book report in the fourth grade, but never seen live. The evening I showed up for a modern dance class at Centre de danse du Marais, a large building with studios named for composers surrounding the courtyard, and the teacher did not find out until the end that I was a tourist, and I walked out chatting with another woman who had been in the class, who worked for the power company. The intense longing to share the experience intricately tied to a need to have the experience be uniquely my own. The savoring the experience of a world capital while I was still living in a small town, but yearning to move to another world capital. The not knowing that in the space of less than five years, I’d return to Paris with my future husband J (then my boyfriend of one year) and stay in a proper hotel with a proper view of Parisian rooftops and visit museums and again buy crêpes to warm our hands because it was February again and we’d borrowed some magical book from the library which led us to not have one bad meal the whole trip, and the Louvre, and the Métro, and the Luxembourg Gardens and the Musée Picasso and the falafel and the lychees we bought on the street near Notre Dame that cause me to think of Paris whenever I buy lychees and the bag of croissants bought on our way to the airport which fell down in the street, spilling its precious cargo, mocking us for leaving so soon.

At no point did I ascend the Eiffel Tower. I figured I would be back and I’d do it then. I don’t know, I don’t know. Antiquities in Syria are now rubble, as are the Buddhas in Bamiyan, which had lasted thousands of years. It is hard to count on the Tour Eiffel. It is hard to count on anything.

Paris, my heart sobs. I’d say more in French, but I don’t really speak it anymore. It hurts too much. I’ll let Robert Desnos speak for me:

Le dernier poème

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi,
Il me reste d’être l’ombre parmi les ombres
D’être cent fois plus ombre que l’ombre
D’être l’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
dans ta vie ensoleillée

Maybe you didn’t realize it when I named this blog a year ago. Maybe I didn’t realize it. “I’ll Live,” after all, was meant to be a wry comment on my health situation. A dismissal of it, with a shrug and a half-smile. But it turns out it was also a prediction – and, thus far, one that seems to be holding up pretty well. I have my doctors and nurses to thank. Well, I could thank my immune system and various enzymes in my body for cooperating (for the most part) with my treatment, but the body doesn’t speak human language. It takes its thank yous in, like, kale and exercise. More of those things coming soon! Promise!

When you seek to cast a thank-you net you find it expands infinitely, it widens, and eventually encircles more and more AND MORE people, until before you know it, it catches nearly everyone you’ve ever met, and they’re all looking at each other in a bewildered way. Such has been the nature of communicating cancer via blog. People who would never talk to each other in an elevator are drawn together by what I write here – equal parts tales of woe and tales of whoaaaa. This means I have become the elevator. Or the net.

I’m trying to have some fun here. On anniversaries there is a strong impulse to be maudlin. I’m not feeling very maudlin. If anything, I’m kind of pissed off right now. Two weeks ago, I set a personal record for vigorous exercise, vigorous healthy cooking (including my holy grail, making enough to freeze for later), and I recorded a resultant weight loss. It was The Best Week. Naturally, it ended in illness. A headcold descended and I am still, ten days later, not completely out from under it. All of last week was lost to marathon honking into Kleenex, downing gallons of tea, inhaling cough-inducing eucalyptus oil steam, pressing hard on pressure points in my face, attempting to nap while mouth-breathing, defrosting the meals I’d been hoping to save for later, and chanting incantations. Okay, maybe I wasn’t very regular with the incantations. But once again, as every time I get sick, whether a Major or a minor illness, it is astonishing to note how quickly things can go downhill. How quickly I want to retreat to the cave, assume a protective posture, disengage from polite society. I’m emerging again, I’m trying to get back to 100%, but to be realistic, I’ll need to take a nap right now if I want to hit 80%.

When I think back over the past year of posts – over two hundred of them now, and still very few of them usefully tagged (at this point I won’t even try to apologize) – I think they fall into a few major categories. Tributes – to family, to artists or specific artworks, to caregivers. Updates – from the sublime to the ridiculous, with perhaps only 24 hours or so separating the two extremes. Reportage – giving the “and you are there” feel to my treatment, with no detail spared (to the chagrin of some). Rants – because what is a blog without a good rant or two? Hmmm, already up to four categories. I think I should stop there.

If you’ve been a habitual reader and commenter over the past year, I would love to hear what your favorite post was (if you can remember it) and even what the worst post was. If you’ve been reading in the background – yes, you there! – thanks for reading. If you’re just finding this blog now, as a result to a web search, because you’re feeling kind of alone and because you may be the only person in your entire country to be receiving the same drug therapy I am – well, I wish I could hug you. It can be hard to be a citizen of this fledgling country, New Cancer, and it can be hard to get citizens of Cancer to recognize our documents. We don’t have an anthem yet, or a flag, but perhaps we can agree that our national food is the almighty doughnut. And, of course, that we want all cancer, new or old, to just get fucking dead.

Since it is November, a month during which many people stave off the boredom between Halloween and Christmas by trying to write a novel, I am repeating a similar exercise I did in 2013, and writing a poem each day (I’ve never been much of a fiction writer). Some friends have joined me. So posting here may be lighter than usual this month, while I try to set some poem ideas alight. I do have a scan coming up next week, so you can count on an update then, and if you’re lucky, maybe yet another photo of that horrid bottle of berry-flavored barium sulfate. So gross, yeah, but… I’ll live.