In running this is called a Recovery Day. You don't do anything. You rest. You build your strength because you are going to have to go to and get tired all over again.
I think my main efforts right now are on not concentrating on Wednesday, and the next chemo, as it looms. Jim keeps saying not to get ahead, and he is right every time. But it is really hard. So hard to know that Wednesday is coming: to remember the emails where people have said "Oh yeah, week 3 is the killer." To know that it will, without doubt, be worse than last time. To remember last time. To know.
And to leave it be. To concentrate on getting a lot of food down, on resting, on talking to my cells.
N started this. She told me 'talk to my cells.' Jim said he had a place he went to in his head when the chemo was bad.
These things are hard for me. I'm an technical, physical, actor. I am in my body, not describing it, not next to it telling it stuff. I had to leave the room earlier because the roommate-a dream, by the way--was watching public TV, and public TV doesn't have a whole Saturday's worth of programming. So Auto World was replaying for the second time in two hours. When I realized I had memorized most of the hosts dialogue about family sedans and green practices at the Ford Rouge plant the first time the show was in the background, and I was mumbling along, I just had to go for a walk.
Like I've said, it's dog DNA. Actors fear dogs and kids in their work because dogs and kids are present. It is not to say I am not totally premeditated and or the control freak I am known to be. But the subtler acts of looking at myself from what N would call "close third person," from a position just near enough to talk myself down, take myself away, make myself stop fearing: that's not a strong suit. Another weakness to work on.
But N put it in perspective: when I try to help her get to sleep by talking her through her body parts, just mentioning the feet, the legs, the torso. Just going up or down through the frame, trying to be aware, for just a second, of each bit. It is meditative. It made sense. I just never do it for myself.
My mother used to 'draw my face' if I woke up from a nightmare or couldn't sleep. Just trace a cold washcloth across my face and say 'eyes. nose. chin. cheek' until I was asleep again.
I have music, but for some reason have not tried it yet. My reaction to music tends towards the passionate, angry, and active. When I took a friend to get his skull tattooed with a Lion Fish, he started out listening to Beethoven to get through the pain. It didn't work. We switched to heavy metal, and he said it made more sense. I think I will have to go to the music at the bottom, when the crunch and the strum and the screaming are what makes sense, and I have stopped trying to make something pleasant out of it.
That could be macho BS, no doubt, but that's how it feels so far, and I have been scared to play music to this point.
But for now, please look at the picture up top. A friend emailed yesterday and said that if you click on them they get bigger. I didn't know that: maybe you did.
The photo above is "Holter's Super Happy Cancer Book!!!" Three exclamation points, please. I rarely use them, so let's take it while we can.
As soon as the diagnosis came down, N went out and got a schedule ledger so that she could calmly and lovingly and carefully note, map, write, remind, chart, and follow whatever came at us in the coming weeks and months' efforts to keep me not dead.
She just appeared with it. Granted, I was pretty shocked and awed those first days, but I honestly just sort of have a vision of her standing near the couch all of a sudden with this morose maroon ledger she had already started putting telephone numbers and lymphoma notes into--remember back when we were kids and thought it was lymphoma? Those were the days.
My input into the deeply important cause of my health was "I wish it had stickers."
She furrowed her brow.
"You know. Stickers. Stupid stickers, like special kids put on their helmets. Knight Rider, unicorns. Stickers."
The brow, lovely as always, remained furrowed.
Then more time passes in my memory. Blurry terror, some TV, deciding very actively to not look at the internet anymore. Time. Passing.
And then the morose maroon ledger is on the table in the living room and there's a stack of printer paper next to it.
N has looked, and we, oddly enough, don't have a lot of stickers. N has shopped, and apparently stickers are not all the rage amongst the crazy kids these days.
So N has taken her PhD-grade internet researching skills and she has dug up what she thinks I would like to have on my Super Happy Cancer Book!!!
That she even knew where to get a photo of 7-time Formula 1 Champion Michael Schumacher. That she dug up a recent photo of Sci-Fi/Fantasy author Piers Anthony. Judas Preist. Freddy Mercury, George Carlin. Iron Maiden. Icelandic crime thriller Jar City by Arnaldur Indriatson. She didn't get my exact motorcycle model right, but she got damn close. And I wouldn't mind a Duke II to augment my 640 Adventure someday, anyway. The list goes on, all dead-on.
And that the whole thing still manages--the Bowie and the Cal Rikpken and the Greyfriar's Bobby--to feel so extremely 14 year-old.
She found the terror, she found the time I needed to start from, the time I was small, the time where fear can still be So Big. And she brought it all to me, nice and safe and on paper.
But we had to work together. Apparently my input was being bent. She would have cut out squares and tried to get as much on there as possible. But I made the loopy cuts and the little cuts and the odd angles and the skinny bits. And between the two of us we got a pretty good bit of what I need to see when I have to open my Super Happy Cancer Book!!!
We had to throw the "Know Your Goat" schematic on the inside cover, and the Obama/Biden sticker on the back. But we got a lot done.
And if you look at the top center. Those are the rocking chairs.
We're gonna sit next to each other in. In a long. Long. Time.
On a recovery day.
