The Bride: “How was your day?”
Me: “Woke up. Ate breakfast. Drove to radiation therapy. Came home. Slept. Woke up nauseous. Took pill. Slept. Woke up nauseous. Took another pill. Slept. Then you came home.”
Such is my life on radiation and chemo. I thought the chemo was probably responsible for the low, low, low energy levels. But my radiation doctor says no, it’s probably her doing instead. She says studies have shown that radiation zaps the energy and causes great fatigue, even more so than the type of chemo I’m receiving, and I’m getting blasted every weekday for not one but two internal masses. They don’t know precisely why radiation has this life-energy draining effect. But the nature of cancer is that your body can’t tell the good cells from the bad cells. So it sees radiation as a form of attack and rallies bodily resources to defend against it. I have another two weeks of this ahead of me. Lord, help me.
I have a window of maybe an hour in the morning where I can summon up enough energy to hit the keyboard. That’s why I have not been posting more. I do take in the news, though. The Walter White of bloggers within me would love to say something, for instance, about the latest revelations on how Iran continues to snooker our nuclear negotiation team, growing its nuclear stockpile after the administration paid good cash money (excuse me, “relaxed sanctions”) to be able to say the program was “frozen.” My favorite moment was when State Department spokesperson Marie Harf called the report “totally inaccurate.” How much confidence does that give you in this whole project, given that the authors of said “totally inaccurate” report are the very ones on whom we’ll be relying for compliance monitoring going forward? Apparently only those reports finding total compliance will be accepted as “accurate.” So far the parody I wrote about this is holding up pretty well, I’d say.
I’m tempted to insert some additional articulately phrased scathing commentary here. The Walter White of bloggers within me certainly wants to do so. But I find I can muster neither the energy nor the cerebral prowess. So I’ll just say this: “The Obama Administration sucks! It sucks it sucks it sucks it suuuuuuuuuucks!” There. That may not be an intellectually compelling argument but I feel so much better now.
Speaking of Walter White, I finally did it—I shaved off the rest of my hair. I was 85% bald before treatment anyway. What was left was getting scraggly and shaggy. The literature they give you on how to cope with your radiation and chemo torture says that a lot of people decide to do what I did, and peremptorily shave. So I did. Interestingly, even though chrome-domitude was my natural state before the chemo, I find myself compelled to wear a hat when going outside now. Go figure.
I want to remind everyone that my latest novel, The Dark, went on sale June 1 and is available both in print and for the Kindle. The print version will be widely available shortly at most major online booksellers; it’s available at Amazon.com now along with the Kindle version. I’ll be writing more about this as soon as I can muster some more energy. Meanwhile, I will be sending out signed copies to the ten winners of the Goodreads giveaway.
The next stop for me: I’ll be getting a second opinion from an M.D. Anderson oncologist in Phoenix to assess the next action steps, which will almost certainly involve even more chemo. This is actually at the request of my primary oncologist. That visit will happen a week and a half from now. Watch this space.
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For more on my medical travails, go here.
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