April 29

Another good day. No pain at all. Blood sugars are near normal, but still over 200. Doctor says that is very good. I figure one more good day before I hit the intravenous chemo. I am kind of anxious to see if it will be as bad as the first cycle.

Getting the intravenous chemotherapy is not such a bad experience itself. I go to a brand new facility not far from the house. The staff is friendly. The procedure has five prep steps intended to mitigate the misery of the chemo. They give me steroids, anti-allergens, pain medicine and so on before they give me the serious stuff. The two chemo drugs take an hour for the first one and a half hour for the second. During that time they give me lunch, a sandwich. When they are all done they are very kind and they make sure I am feeling okay as I leave. I have about two hours from that point to get home and get comfortable before the pain and misery sets in. By Friday morning I am pretty much useless.

This Friday I will try something different. My acupuncturist wants to treat me for pain during the Friday session. So I will try to get over there for the session, no easy feat considering how I expect I'll feel. During my last session she left me with the needles for an hour instead of the normal 30 minutes because she thought I was getting a lot of benefit. I am so accustomed to the procedure that I fell asleep on the table. Since I am being treated for pain I guess that is pretty good. In my opinion the jury is still out on whether the acupuncture works. I know I do feel better when I walk out of there, but since there is no dramatic difference to cite, I am still a little in doubt.

The other day a friend asked me if I valued any of the little moments in life differently than I did before. I have to say I don't really. Mostly life and those little moments still seem the same. I am hoping once I get something definitive in the way of a positive prognosis after chemo then maybe the magic will return to sunsets and smelling fresh flowers. The stress of believing I may die soon is pretty much constant and it limits how positive I can feel. Having said that, some moments are better than others. This morning I was out on my motorcycle and I was happy and care free as a lark. Irony of ironies, I found a dead Meadow Lark on my deck this afternoon. You can't make this stuff up, it just happens and I report it. Still, I can laugh about it. I still have life and I still think. But I do digress.

I am old enough that much of the wonder and excitement of life has worn off. I can remember being so excited every time I saw the Pacific Ocean as a kid. As we topped that last hill or made that curve and there the ocean was, I could barely catch my breath. Since them I have sailed across that ocean and fought in a war on the other side and returned safe but changed. I still love the ocean but it is not the same. Other sights in nature still inspire me. The Milky Way is still spectacular, when I can be in a place where I can see the millions of stars. I have been known to make long trips just to view that spectacle. These days I still admire a budding flower and the clouds of a thunderstorm. I am looking deep within myself to see if I can rekindle the magic that made life so spectacular that it took my breath away in my youth. Oddly enough the drama of this time in my life is making that introspection even more productive. Life still has drama and wonder, I maybe forgot how to see if very well. My old eyes will see it again I am sure.