so I lied..

Weight: 229 lbs.

I'm back a day early because I just felt like writing. Reports filtering back to me from our tailgating group and others suggest they like reading what I say. I will have to be careful with this kind of praise. Actually when I weighed yesterday I was a pound lower--such is variability--and 3-4 lb losses across a week are a bit too much in the long run. I have what one of our friends calls "chemo head", a sort of light headedness that is really responsive to food. Problem: what I think may be due to drastically lowered calorie intake, plus fairly radical change in diet is conflated with the drugs they are feeding me. So chemo head is probably a combination of both. This past couple days I have been trying to factor out the food component! I have been starving. Food tastes great and Jan has rescued me with all sorts of healthy stuff. Still after I am sated, I have chemo head, ergo these are the drugs talking.

An aside here on sociability: I have been declining engagements for a number of reasons: 1. I don't feel like engaging in repeated discussions of how I feel; some of it is laziness and fatigue due to the sheer repetition of explaining my condition to everyone I talk to (hence this blog). I probably have always been this way; but my current state seems to exacerbate those feelings. 2. The potential clamor of gatherings--usually so welcome--seems off putting to me at this time; 3. A good part of those gatherings revolves around food and drink, that during this process I must deny myself. If I were there, I would eat and I would drink. Better simply not to be there.

So, while I feel relatively a lot better as Round 1 of the chemo recedes, there are several ways in which I feel not so hot. Perhaps it is early days yet, but AbJ said that I would feel better by this weekend. He did not say I would feel normal. I have this feeling that normal won't be felt for quite some time. The onc RN was right. On Thursday night after SP&T--a good blow--I went right to sleep. Hallelujah. But I was up whizzing in an hour, and then every two hours after that all night. Not so good. Okay, I thought, a little nap Friday and I'll sleep as usual on Friday night. Not really. Then again last night: down a couple hours, up, and repeat. (And this without booze or a prostate!) What I am slowly beginning to realize is that the R-CHOP and the Velcade are continuing their work--hopefully great work!--even though recent administrations are receding. But this appears also to signify that a kind of altered state is likely to be with me throughout this process.


I am reading a fantastic book called The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Siddharta Mukherjee, 2010) loaned to me by Bill Jenson that he read during his bouts with kidney and prostate cancer. It is really almost a history of medicine. At this point a couple things from that book are relevant:
1. Cancer is not new; the name is. But there is evidence of it in mummified remains of ancient peoples. So it probably always has been with us.
2. It is prevalent now for a couple reasons: one, we live longer. It is a disease of age at least in part; second, we have cleared the decks for it. In general, many of the bacterial infections that used to kill people early in plagues, pandemics, etc. are gone and our extended lives have left cancer a clear path to become the prevailing disease of our time.


I close with a poem from Steve Heaps, used here without his permission, that he composed to deal with his ongoing battle with prostate cancer:


"Why me?"
"Why not you, asshole?"