Cancer is boring

Here's my typical day: I wake up any time between 4 am and 6:30 am, although the latter constitutes "sleeping late" and doesn't happen often. Weekdays I work from 8 to noon, and by the end of that I'm ready to come home and take a nap. I sleep for 2 to 3 hours. When I get up I putz around and try to do something productive; then have something for dinner; then go to bed. All that activity would have taken me to somewhere between 5:30 and 7:30 pm.

But wait, the schedule doesn't always roll out so smoothly. It seems like more often than not I have to go get some new test (another CT scan last week) or stop by the radiology clinic the day before the CT scan to pick up a couple of bottles of a vile concoction charmingly referred to as "smoothies." Or I've run out of library books and have to go get more. Or I need a prescription renewed. Or normal things, like needing to go to the bank or grocery shopping.

And let us not forget that two Fridays out of three I'm wired up for about three hours while soothing, healing poisons wash through my body.

The second chemo session went as well as the first. I had no after-effects, no nausea, nothing. In fact, I felt pretty energetic on Saturday and Tina came over to help me clean the kitchen and living room, and on Sunday Sherri helped me cut out more chemo hats.  But then the sky fell yesterday, Monday, and I was too tired to get out of bed. I certainly didn't feel like I worked too hard or too much over the weekend, so I'm not sure whether it was a delayed reaction to Friday's chemicals, or just a tired day.

And what makes cancer so dang boring is that I can't just have a lazy day without worrying that it'll never go away. All of my clothes are hanging on me because I've lost so much weight: Do I buy more clothes or assume that I'll soon start gaining the weight back? Cancer has taken over every aspect of my life. And yes of course I do fun things, and I work in the garden and I read and I sew a little bit now and then and I hang out with my friends, but C A N C E R is the current soundtrack.