Oh babe I'm psyched to go.
It has been a while, and no gnus is still good gnus. I've been running, biking, swimming, TRX-ing, eating, sleeping, crapping (c'mon; it's a valuable indicator), and working, among many other things I fervently wish to some day once again take for granted.
But this is still each morning:
Wake up.
Am I alive? Check.
Breathing? Check
Feel basically normal? Check.
OK, let's trying sitting up, shall we?
Head rush? Nope.
Dizziness? Strange aches? Neuropathy? Nope.
OK, let's head to the living room. Are there Froot Loops?
The am-I-dead? checklist slowly fades over the next couple hours, usually, but pops in like an unannounced grandparent every once in a while during the day: at the top of a flight of stairs (heart gonna explode? Nope), after a gorgeous and weighty styrofoam box of street-meat (will that four pounds of lamb-gyro-platter-yellow-rice-white-sauce calcify or inflate my pancreas?...Nope), etc etc.
My numbers did not plummet after starting the chemo again. Nor did they elevate. So I am still on the 6MP every other day, and have added the half-dose Methotrexate (7 pills one week, eight the next) back into the schedule.
Wednesday I felt a little crappy; and the world stopped spinning.
The Methotrexate roils the guts, and hits in a kind of small swoon of unpleasantness over the course of a day or day and a half. Then it passes. Usually. And it is all bearable. Usually.
Tuesday I was running and felt a little cramp-y twinge-y discomfort. Nowhere near far enough from any of this to not immediately think in at least one quadrant of my head that my liver was about to shear from its moorings and rifle out of my body like a rotting plum shot from a cannon, I tried to remain calm. Slowed down. Ran through it.
And it passed. And I felt fine and did 7 miles total that day. Good stuff.
Wednesday I felt a little less good, so took the day off exercise. And stayed feeling just the slightest bit not good for the day. Reining in terror, muffling hurled self-diagnoses, breathing deep: in through the nose and out through the mouth. Trying not to have everything else in our lives blanked out by worry, by the sink-stomached sense of preparation for a hospital trip, or bad news, or anything.
And around 4 I started to feel better. Got my appetite back, at a late lunch bigger than my wife, and by 8 felt 'normal' again, and had trouble getting to sleep because whatever energy had partially abandoned me during the day roared back and I would have stayed up all night on the computer if N had not admonished me not to.
So it was nothing. Well, not nothing because everything is something, and of course there's the off chance that four days from now my neck will fall off or my capillaries will self-shred or something, and as I fade from existence some placid-faced medico will lean over me and say "you didn't happen to have stitch in your side four or five days ago, did you? Hmmmmm. I see...Oh1 Look, he's an organ donor. Daniel, get in here! I've found the vas deferans we've been looking for!"
But I have to wrench myself, and N has to wrench herself, away from the worry end of that. It was nothing. I'm 'normal' now enough to maybe have caught a little bug, fought it off, and moved on. Or I had some bad shrimp. or Whatever.
Sigh.
We were in Baltimore last week. N was a visiting scholar at my high school, and she was miraculous. Teachers who were on panels that agreed to suspend me when I was a student, teachers who opened their intros of her with "...she's here because she's married to a Friends School alum, though my first question to her was 'what were you thinking marrying that guy?'" now watched, rapt, as she connected with kids from grades eight to twelve, told her story, teased their stories out of them, had other teachers and administrators taking her writing exercises, scribbling furiously to find a sliver of truth in their lives and work that might resemble the slivers she assembled into her book. And they did it; great beautiful pieces of lives landed on paper, were read to each other, created moments when young men stopped snarling and twitching and just looked up and out, eyes clear, unabashed by their feelings, and young women pushed past hair-flips and peer-fear to lay out a line, a truth, a sadness, a ferocious courage, on a page. 'Proud' does not have enough letters to be a word big enough for what I felt.
And we were in town to collaborate in a surprise 40th for my oldest friend. I actually had to fake taking a dump at one point to keep him in his house long enough for the group to assemble and prep at the bar around the corner. Not that he was in the john with me--which would have made faking a dump a much more acting-intensive event--but he wanted to leave early so I had to stall. But it got pulled off, and I think he was really touched. He slowed down when he entered the bar and this varied and thrown-together mob of what a human's life looks like in the faces of those we draw to us starting yelling Happy Birthday to him. He slowed for a second, almost stopped, then picked up the pace and went into the collegiality. I was behind him so couldn't see his face, but he's got 'stoic' pretty nailed anyway, so that wouldn't have been much help. But I think that slowing down was a moment of being surprised, and maybe a little overwhelmed, in a good way. Awash in the good cheer of one's circle. Good stuff.
And in an hour a Town Car will trundle N and I to Newark International Airport, where we will board a plane and go to California for two weeks. N has book tour events, visiting-scholar gigs, and some deeply missed friends to hug once again. I have some union people to check in with, at least one audiobook to narrate, and friends and family up and down the shuddering fault lines of the Golden State to visit, show I am not dead, hug, barrage with endless talking and jokes.
You know: a trip.
It will be the first time since diagnosis that I have been more than 207 miles (Baltimore) from New York Presbyterian Hospital.
The City-State recedes.
I have to get bled by some random lab tech on Monday, and the Monday after that.
Fax the results to NY, talk to my Drs. Hopefully continue on because everything's fine.
Maybe get back east as fast as we can because everything's not.
On a jet plane. The first time since diagnosis.
Which was one year ago. Exactly. Today.
Three hundred sixty-five days ago I became a patient. My, our, focus shifted irrevocably onto a single glowing hate-seed of disease and shattering uncertainty.
Nothing will ever be the same.
Three hundred sixty-five days ago, Tax Day 2010, in an act of betrayal for which I know myself well enough to be sure I will never be fully able to forgive it, my own body, my own fucking cells, the ninth and eleventh stalk-ends of my own fucking genes, turned against me, slapped my focus, owned my ears like a dog-whistle.
Stole me.
Instead of returning to a musty apartment in May, we're returning to a corkscrew to the pelvis, a syringe of Vincristine, and a handful of steroids.
Wah wah wah. Life's a bitch. Quit pissing and moaning, you friggin' sissy.
Shit happens. And then more shit happens. Now finish packing; the car's coming.
It's gonna be a great trip. I was scowling writing that last bit above. Then I stopped. Just started to think about traveling, seeing family, friends, somewhere else.
And I started to smile a little.
OK, Gotta go.
