This photo isn't all that interesting. And neither am I.
God, that's nice.
If you are a knock-on-wood type, get going, because I am about to bullhorn the jinx-spirits with extreme prejudice:
I think things are going well. I think it's gonna be OK.
Now we'll pause for a second to see if a tractor-trailer swerves off the West Side Highway and somehow flies three blocks over and three stories up to smash through the walls of our building and kill me...
Or we'll wait and see if all the radioactive bits in the air that poured from the Daichi nuclear power plant in Japan will re-form into one super-glowing fist-orb of gamma death and spear through the atmosphere, city, streets, walls, and air directly into the base of my neck, instantly melting me onto my chair as either a globule or a stain (depending on whose Spinal Tap drummer-death version you prefer)...
...
OK. I guess I'm OK for a minute or two.
In a few good films--and a lot more crappy ones--there is a "Spilled Sheaf of Papers" moment. In general, this is a moment when a character in a film, overburdened by a large stack of paperwork--often extremely valuable to the character's continuing states of happiness and/or employment--either stumbles or is caught by the wind, sending immediately and irretrievably mixed pieces of paper flying into the air, across the plaza of an office complex, or (in films where the filmmaker really doesn't care about the American audience's need for tidiness in storytelling) into a rain-soaked gutter.
There are basically three reasons for a Spilled Sheaf of Papers moment:
1-Show a protagonist at the end of his or her rope, shattered by life, thrown to the wind.
2-Give an excuse for an attractive person to come to the protagonist's aid, usually leading within minutes to an 'abstract' shot of hands clutching their fingers together on rumpled sheets because American movies rarely show actor's pretending to orgasm--or if they do, it is embarrassingly bad. [Note: Steve Railsback and Barbara Hershey share a really good, elegant actor-gasm in "The Stunt Man," a film everybody should see].
3-Show how fragile everything is: puff! and it's all gone.
The most recent one I can think of is from "Ghost Writer," the Polanski film where Ewan MacGregor tails Pierce Brosnan while trying to figure out a lot of stuff. The last image is a sheaf of papers blowing down a street. I think it was meant to show Reason 3, but there was a touch of Reason 1 in there, too.
I'm not the protagonist in this barely-held-together parallel I'm drawing. I'm the papers.
And it is kind of nice.
Health update:
Swallowed the fourth 6MP of this attempt at Maintenance today. Every other day, 50mgs. I feel it a little: fatigue, some stiffness in my joints, etc. But just barely. And I rode a bike 23 miles or so yesterday, so there could be other reasons for those symptoms.
As you can see above, my hair has come back. I shaved my face yesterday, and the hair on my skull is oddly baby-soft, which goo-goos my macho a little, but what are you gonna do?
My most recent blood work was good; numbers higher, nothing seemingly out of place, thrush gone from my mouth.
I didn't seem to have the prednisone crash, which N and I feared quite a bit. I came off the Vincristine, then came off the Pred, and I felt tired from having been up and buzzing on 'roids for five days, but nothing psychological, nothing deeper than expected. Nothing even remotely like the horrors and weeping and lost-soul-in-a-blender of last time. Just a groggy morning or two and then back to whatever normal is this month.
N was in Houston for the past few days, teaching and reading and speaking and visiting a dear friend. And I did not die or crash or melt or unknowingly fart my duodenum into my undies while she was gone. Another brick in the wall of thinking we're doing OK, making progress.
Tomorrow we go back for blood work again, and I will take a half-dose (only 7 of the friggin little pills) of Methotrexate.
The Drs are still being conservative, and I am thankful, and I am curious. I think they still feel that the Maintenance dosages in their books/experience/habit will be the right ones, but I was not healthy enough and/or other factors screwed it up. So they will slowly and conservatively edge the doses back up until I get to a sustained maintenance level: 3.5 white blood count and 150 platelet count, or thereabouts.
I think my 6mp sensitivity is very real and will mean that I reach those numbers at lower doses. But I'm not certain, any more than they are. And I have grown stronger in many other ways during this no-or-less chemo time, so maybe I can take their doses now.
It'll be interesting. We'll see.
It is nice to think that, without any attendant terror. Because they'll stop when my levels are 'right.' Not when their doses are 'right.' We're confident of that. Which is very good.
This week I only managed 8 total miles of running. But I swam, and I rode, and I did some TRX, and I had a week of auditions and unionism and work that felt very like what my body remembers as a 'normal week' from before diagnosis. I was a little beat today, but beat from effort. From living; not from not-dying: those distinctions are tiny, but very powerful. Like fleas, or May Lou Retton.
Biking yesterday, I passed over a section of new path that was installed along the Hudson after my diagnosis. It is too far north for any of my runs outside so far to have gotten me there. Friends and teammates who run had mentioned it, reported on it. I saw it from a car window a couple times. I yearned, I pined. I probably whined.
Yesterday, I rode up it, rode under the GW bridge, rode up the hill and went to the Cloisters, and turned around and rode back, passing over the new section again.
Smiling ear to ear, even as I cursed the headwind and tried to stay in an aerodynamic riding position. Ear to ear to be back out there.
For the first time in a while, I am the sheaf of papers, and not the protagonist. I'm just part of the scenery, blown around, maybe rained on, maybe picked up by attractive people who will sort me back into my correct order, and then leave me on the credenza while they lock lips and disrobe on their way down the hall and around the corner toward the bedroom--careful to lay out flagstones of clothing for the camera to follow later during the 'nudge nudge wink wink look where they ended up!' tracking shot.
As a performer, of course, being part of the scenery is completely anathema, horrid, humiliating, and shitty. I have already caught myself bemoaning the loss of drama that used to follow me into a room; when nobody was sure if I was gonna make it, gonna make it back or not, gonna pass out in their office because they didn't usually converse with people that particular shade of see-through.
I'm human, flawed, and sometimes pathetic.
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I still have my foibles jauntily hung around my neck like Mardis Gras beads on a topless drunk chick. And so, for moments at a time, I miss the excitement of everyone turning when I shuffle into a room because, fer fuck's sake, that guy's got CANCER!! Or the sound of spines snapping as people bend over backwards to accommodate the fourteen minutes I can spend in the real world before partially decomposing and going back to my flopped existence.
And I am not pretending for a hot second that we're anywhere near done with this. Maintenance has not been figured out, I've got two full-blown Hyper CVAD poison-chugging parties coming at me in August and February. I could relapse. I could step on a nail while my counts are down. I could take Methotrexate tomorrow and have it disrupt my innards like logic disrupts the Palin household.
But, this past week or so, in terms of my health, things have been...regular. Normal, even. Hell, I think some of it has been forgettable, but I can't remember for sure.
And while the performing bear weeps at the silence where applause should be, the rest of me has been smiling.
Ear to friggin ear.
