uh oh...

Weight = 224 lbs.

Too much weight loss in too short a period of time! Chemo must be kicking the snot out of my red blood cells. While we can count on some portion of this loss to owe to fluid loss, always present in weight-loss program starts, this still means that I have lost 8 lbs in less than 2 weeks. And that shouldn't be happening because:

Steppin' Out With My Baby. Jan and I went to SLC on Tuesday for the first GAM Foundation jazz concert of the year. We are making these decisions on a daily basis depending on how I feel, and, as reported earlier, except for fatigue, I feel pretty good, right now. Anyway, Lisa and Jan--ever planning ahead, and thinking of me--laid in some provisions at Midvale II (Lisa's/Kay's and our pied a terre ala SLC), so we wouldn't have to do restaurant food and the tiring experiences and off-cancer diet associated with that. So we drove down early afternoon and napped in our own second bed--what a luxury! Then Jan and I had a simple meal of grass fed steak, organic fingerling golden potatoes and some canned corn.  I filled up. The smell of cooking meat is so powerful and positive to me right now. The concert was excellent. We had seen the same group--The Jeff Hamilton Trio--in August at the Port Townsend Jazz Festival. Here they did a program that barely overlapped with that in PT but with the same brio they always have. (Their bassist is a UU grad who has made the big time.)

The next morning we shopped Whole Foods for as much organic groceries as we could fit in a big cooler and the back of the RAV. I was tired when we got home, but the MLB ALCS kept me awake.  There is still residual guilt over watching sports, or indeed any daytime TV as connoting sloth and time wasting. In the 6+ years of retirement I have had an implicit rule (for myself only) that the TV doesn't go on until 5 pm for news, etc. I have to give myself permission to do that. Fall baseball is an exception. To be able to watch the same teams on a daily basis gives one considerably more familiarity with what is happening and what to expect. However, given my current condition, fuck the rule.

But I digress...The upshot of the last few days and this inordinate detail is that I am back to eating my pre-diagnosis load of foods: healthy (eg granolas/yoghurt/fruit), protein rich (the steak!), carb laden (not so much but, yes, bagels with peanut butter (organic, if you please); nutritious all, including an indulged-in craving yesterday for some herring in cream sauce (come on: it's wild caught, loaded with good omegas and it was, after all, from Whole Foods). In sum, from about Monday on I have been eating really well, ingesting enough calories, that if things were normal, this amount of eating should have halted and reversed the early 4 lb loss initially documented above. Undoubtedly more data points are required and I'll start to gather them. But for now, count me worried.

More on Sociability. Inevitably, when one clicks on the POST icon, one thinks, oh no, I forgot to say X. What I forgot to add to the list of anti-social factors in my preceding post was one of the most important considerations of all:  Socializing and the immune system. As soon as I get feedback of low white blood cell counts, I will have to pick and choose when I leave home, another reason against hanging in groups. The jazz concert of Tuesday past is directly contrary to this, but it is early days yet. I get a blood count the day of my next infusion Oct. 24. They use that data to tell whether one can tolerate another blast of poison (red blood cell counts) and to determine how effectively one's body is still fighting (white blood cell counts). They have my attention.