I'm Here. I'm Fine. Just Puttering About and Being Lazy.

I guess it's been a while -- too long -- since I've written here. I had a guest from out of town, Christine, a friend from college, and we were busy running around and doing stuff from last Friday to Wednesday morning, when I drove her to the airport. Then yesterday I slept a lot and just felt lazy, and had a bit of a go-round with feelings of nausea, but nothing worth writing about. It has come to my attention, however, that when I don't write, some of my dear readers get worried that there's something wrong with me. Fear not. I am fine -- sleeping more than usual, but other than that, A-OK. It has been hard to get a rhythm established now that I'm not having radiation every Monday through Friday morning. I have a break until March 10, when I get a CT scan to see what those tumors have been up to while I've been getting treatment. I also will spend a couple of hours getting my port flushed on March 10, and getting my labs drawn. Looks like pulmonary rehab will start on or about April 1, and involve classes every Tuesday and Friday. Right now I've cut back on acupuncture to Mondays only, but I will resume acupuncture twice a week once chemotherapy starts again, March 11. I meet with a pulmonologist March 6, and sometime in there I will also go to the orthotics people to get my custom orthotics fitted. The plantar fasciitis has just about disappeared, but the object of the game, and the custom orthotics, is not to have it reappear. I will be starting a knitting project sometime in the next day or two. Other than that, just visiting with friends, cooking, doing physical therapy for my foot, meditating, thinking good thoughts, and occasionally doing a good deed, or at least trying to do no harm. I'm wondering whether I would have more energy and less nausea if I went back to acupuncture twice a week. I have an appointment Monday and will talk with Dr. Lin (first name: Fang. Don't you love it?). Meanwhile, have a good weekend, everyone, and don't worry about me. Be happy! Love, Valjean

Goodbye Radiation Therapy, Hello Pulmonary Rehab

Today I had my last radiation treatment. I am apparently the poster child for people who do well on it. The radiation oncologist asked me if I'd be willing to talk to other patients, and the radiation nurse, as I was leaving, looked like she was sending her firstborn off to her first day of school. Except for needing more sleep than usual, I have had few, if any, of the other side effects that so weirded me out when I read about them in "Radiation Therapy and You." One more reason -- and reminder -- to stay in the moment. And to promise myself not to write things like "Radiation Therapy and You," should such a job offer cross my threshold. And not to listen when doctors like my radiation oncologist, who is prone to hyperbole, say things like: "By the time you're finished, you're going to want to put a bullet in my head." I have no such impulses, although I did try to suggest to her the other day that she might want to consider toning down her rhetoric.

What's next? A three to four week break, with no treatment of any kind, followed by two more chemotherapies beginning either March 11 or March 18. I'll find out tomorrow, when I get my labs done. The next rounds of chemo will be 22 days apart, meaning I will finish up treatment at the end of April. I will get a CT scan before my next chemo, and I am also supposed to see my pulmonologist, although I can't get an appointment until March 6. Finally, I am to enroll in pulmonary rehab. After three phone calls to the U.S.S. Northwestern to try to do so, I was told my pulmonologist needs to send an Rx, notes, and results from my last pulmonary function test to the pulmonary rehab therapist. So I left yet another message; it's almost impossible to talk to an actual person first time out of the chute.

For those of you who haven't seen me in a while, I still have a full head of hair, although it might be thinner than it used to be, and it's definitely grayer. It strikes me as odd how many people inquire about this -- men as well as women.

Today I am somewhat lethargic, possibly due to separation anxiety, or possibly because I might have overdone it yesterday, when I felt so good I didn't even take a nap, or seem to need one. Instead, thanks to my generous friend Nancy G., I took in a matinee performance of "Dolly West's Kitchen," by Frank McGuinness at Timeline Theatre, upstairs at the Wellington Avenue Church (the basement of which was the scene of the founding of Chicago Women in Publishing back in the early seventies). It's a good play by a good company, and I highly recommend it. It's set in County Donegal's Inishowen Peninsula, one of my favorite places, and deftly interweaves some complicated family dynamics with an examination of the Irish Republic's neutrality during World War II and two Irish-American romances, one involving a pair of gay soldiers.

I will sign off now, because it's time to phone in my symptoms to the computerized service that's testing whether tele-reporting of symptoms is more effective than simply telling your doctor what's going on. Modern medicine!

A Gift

This cancer has brought many gifts, not least of which has been reconnecting with old friends. One of these, Doug Wilson, was my professor at Knox. I studied American poetry with him, and also took a seminar on Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, surely one of the best classes of my college career. In January I had the pleasure of dining with Doug and his wife, along with classmate Bill Barnhart and his wife Kate, at the Chicago Literary Club, where Doug gave a talk based on research for his latest book, "Lincoln's Sword." We had a conversation about the value of a liberal arts education, especially literature, in coping with life's challenges. Afterward, he sent me the following, which I pass along as a gift to you: W. H. Auden's Preface to his long poem "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest."

Says Doug: "This is Auden's ars poetica, a brilliant and inexhaustible poem about art and how it relates to life, science, and the great imponderables. In a way, they are all summed up in this Preface, the last part of which you may recognize as being woven from severaI of Shakespeare's key lines. So here it is:"

Preface
(The State Manager to the Critics)

The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there were no death
Or hope of falling down;
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning, and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half.

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains.

Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion’s mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?

Well, who in his own back yard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

Acupuncture

Several people have asked me about acupuncture, so I thought I would show you what it looks like. Here is me on the table, with a tummy full of needles. Mostly they don't hurt going in, although occasionally one does. Today Dr. Lin put a needle in my calf, and it felt like I had just been cattle-prodded. Whatever had been blocked in there unblocked with a vengeance. In Chinese medicinal theory, to oversimplify, the body's energy, or "chi," travels along 12 main routes, or meridians. Illness results from blockage along these routes; the needles unblock blocked energy, allowing the chi to flow, and the body's yin and yang, male and female, dark and light forces to rebalance and come into harmony.


The meridians are associated with various organs: lungs, liver, spleen, kidney, large intestine, and so on. Needles are inserted at various points to address specific issues. Today, for example, Dr. Lin placed a total of 22 needles at various points: a couple on my head to boost energy; one in each crook of the elbow and at various points along the inner arms for the lungs; some around the tummy to control constipation and nausea.

I don't think the acupuncture will cure my cancer, but I do believe that it is helping me survive the treatment. I go twice a week to the office in Oak Park, which is more convenient to my apartment than the one on Michigan Avenue, with its attendant parking hassles.

I had a good day today, great energy all morning, I actually felt very close to normal. Had a lovely nap from 2-4, and the rest of the afternoon tried to make a dent in the endless pile of paperwork that doesn't stop just because I have cancer: filed receipts, returned phone calls, paid a few bills. My upstairs neighbor stopped by with some frozen squash and lemon grass soup, which I will have for lunch tomorrow. My appetite remains voracious, I am happy to report.

Good News, Bad News

Am emerging from a couple of foggy, foggy days. Monday was radiation, acupuncture, and this stunning view from my back porch. The plantar fasciitis is coming along slowly, thanks to aggressive home PT and all the kind suggestions from fellow sufferers. But by Monday afternoon I was dragging, and on Tuesday morning I woke up queasy, depleted, and decidedly sore-footed. After radiation, went up to get my blood drawn, and labs showed that I was dehydrated and low on magnesium, something you don't want to become, I assure you. So they popped in an IV and sat me down for a couple of hours for some fluids, magnesium, antinausea meds, and dexamethasone, my new best friend. Then I limped across the street to the dermatologist's to have the stitches removed from my biopsy, by which time I was reduced to tears. The good news is that the biopsy showed the rash was nothing more serious than inflamed hair follicles, and it's well on its way to disappearing. Inflamed hair follicles on my CHEST? What are hair follicles doing there?

More bad news is that I had to go into the hospital again today for 4 more hours of magnesium infusion. The good news is I feel a WHOLE lot better than yesterday. Appetite's fine, nausea's under control, and although I have to be on a bland diet for another couple of days, I should be AOK by Saturday or Sunday. They tell me I can reasonably expect more of the same, if not worse, after my next two chemos, so I guess the honeymoon's over. But for today, all's well that ends well. Speaking of which, I endedTuesday watching "Harold and Maude," thanks to Netflix. If you haven't seen it lately, I highly recommend it. That, too, reduced me to tears, but the good kind.

Gaetano has been a prince, his self-portrait notwithstanding. He has been here since Sunday, extraordinarily helpful, kind, and very, very funny. He was great kibitzing with the radiation therapist, bringing lunch when I was being re-magnesiumed, patiently waiting through hours of acupuncture, IV infusions, bureacratic snafus, cooking beautiful dinners, shopping, tidying up, knowing when to be quiet, and just what to say when he wasn't, and generally a joy to have around. Bless you, my prince!

Fasciitistas

In the last 36 hours I have discovered the following people have all had plantar fasciitis: my upstairs neighbor, friends Bob and Ken, Nancy's sister Sue, Leonard B, my meditation teacher's wife, probably one or two others who have escaped my aging memory. They have offered various bits of advice (freeze a water bottle and roll your foot over it; write the alphabet with your toe before getting out of bed; pull your toes back to stretch your calf when driving long distances). Yesterday I iced my afflicted foot four or five times, did two rounds of PT at home, and gulped ibuprofen as prescribed. The upshot was that I could get dressed this morning without a cane - progress! So thanks, fellow fasciitistas!