We were up at 5:30 today, out of the house by 6:30 to start the chemo-day across town at 7:00. And I’ll tell you what, ever since Val coughed up those tumor bits I’ve got a whole new attitude about chemo. Chemo is the bee’s knees. Chemo scorches the tumors Continue Reading
Tumult and Joy
I don’t understand this life right now. This morning I am walking and walking at 1000 acres with Cynthia and the dog. And then we get lost. Every trail is a riverbed and every culdesac is a homeless person’s tent. The beautiful cottonwoods are telegraphs from my youth in Montana. Continue Reading
Hairball #3
Val called me at work this morning to say she coughed up another piece of her tumor! Or anyway, she coughed up something unusual, of a slightly different texture than last time, about the size of a smallish pea. It’s now awaiting biopsy in a little jar filled with homemade Continue Reading
urban fortune cookies
I was driving to work this morning in the cold and gray, cursing Portland’s quotation marks around “summer” and trying to breathe through the thumps of anxiety in my chest. Everything felt desperate and impossible. Felt like I’d never again be able to animate the muscles of my face. I Continue Reading
Trying to play “Cluck o Hen” for some scaredy chickens
Please come back Chickens- this song is for you!
Off the Hammock
So on the 28th they are going to put me back into a tube. Scan my chest. Create another picture like the one that started all this. And the doctors will marvel at the 3 dimensional detail of it all. They like to go slice by millimeter slice. (I really Continue Reading
Harboring Felons
I wake up in the middle of the night to pee. there is a moment before awareness that feels like falling. here safe warm in this bed. i know something. but i don’t know what yet. i am a body. and then the knowledge shakes loose and flows down its Continue Reading
automatic… systematic… hydromatic… enzymatic
Val update: When I spoke with her yesterday Val reported the following: TerriSue (oncology nurse supreme) says Val’s white and red blood cell counts are down. This is a good thing, because it means the chemo is successfully affecting her body. So yay. (This also means we should all remember Continue Reading
Holy Horking Hairballs, Batgirl!
—Heads up: entry contains thoroughly icky details— Here is a remarkable thing. A few weeks ago, shortly after chemo began, while out to lunch (I mean that literally), in the midst of a paroxysm of coughing, Val hacked up a biological gobbet of something unusual. It was unlike anything Continue Reading
Eating for an ornery old age
Hi all! I write today from my lovely, humid, jungle-green hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. Abby and I drove here by back roads yesterday, through cornfields and deciduous woods and over swollen muddy rivers, windows down (and hair enormous) in the luscious muggy heat. We gawped at the flooded fields athwart Continue Reading