28 April 2007

I am sitting in the backyard of my parents’ house, luxuriating in the soft northern California springtime, and shaking off six very long days in the hospital. It fades mostly into a blur – at least there’s one welcome side effect to all the drugs. Stanford was a more pleasant hospital to be inpatient, despite not having my own room – there was an easily-accessible, private, and stunning garden, and the IV pumps were newer, quieter, and less prone to dusk-to-dawn squawking. Plus the night nurses were cute. Ahem. Hey, any bit helps.

The come-down has been easier so far, too. While the chemo obviously has taken its toll – the screaming in my head has amped up a few notches again, I did spend most of yesterday staring at the wall and fighting rather rivolting blurp-like concoctions, and it did take a rather large dose of sleep meds to overcome the steriods last night – my overall state of being is relatively good. My blood counts haven’t dropped to the same extent as last time, which means that I will be less easily tired, less easily injured, and less immunocompromised, all of which will make it much easier to enjoy the next couple of weeks before heading off to Indiana.

Sitting around is narcotic in and of itself, but it is no good for me. I find that I have to remind myself that just because life has taken a detour doesn’t meen I have to be stuck in a meaningless eddy. The nurse asks: “Are you a student?” – “Well, kind of yes, well, I WAS a student, no actually, I still am, really. I mean…”. Conversations like these remind me that student-ness is as much a state of mind as one of fact, and that I want to remain determined throughout this business to suck this cancer dry for all it can teach me. It takes a concerted effort, though, to remain engaged with the details of what’s going on, because I feel like I have spend so much time telling people about what is happening on a day-to-day level that I get sick of even thinking about my illness. Often by the time I am finally alone and clearheaded enough to sit down and dedicate some time to investigating on a more medico-scientific level, I find it hard not to indulge in more immediate pleasures or obligations. Blogging seems to fall somewhere in-between, but one of the good results of the pressure to produce is that I am provded a forum in which to reflect on what I am doing with my time, and decide what I want to do about it.