Finding ground again

I saw a bald eagle the other day. It was very much a surprise.  I've been waking up very early lately and upon mentioning this to my friend Stephen, he offered to scoop me up on one of his fly-fishing jags some morning.  I've been trying to say "yes" to more suggestions of getting out of the house and into nature.  Sitting in a comfortable chair in foggy morning light alongside a quiet river held some appeal for me.  I was barely settled in my favorite butterfly bag chair along the upper Rogue River when the giant raptor wings entered my peripheral vision; dipping under the river tree line, 30 feet away and exposing the striking black and white shapes that only define one kind of bird.  My camera was at my side, zipped up tightly in the carrying bag.  There would be no second pass.  The experience was only meant for the awake individual, not the documentary producer.

I've been struggling to write another blog entry for a few days now.  I wake up early thinking I know what I want to talk about.  I end up just starring at my screen.  I feel lousy.  I suppose it is the cumulative nature of chemotherapy treatments and it is definitely compounded by an annoying mouth condition, which won't go away, and makes eating a constant disappointment.  I can feel my energy levels dropping and I realize that this energy is the thing that makes me feel like a robust living person, no matter what the discomforts are.  I can't help going to a place where I imagine that this sapping of energy is what dying feels like.  Is my body shutting down? Why does my chest fell so tight? Inklings of fear and paranoia creep into my psyche.  I look in a mirror and find I still look pretty damned good.  Definitely not dying.  Still, just getting out of a chair feels like an effort and conserving breath seems like a good idea.  The flirtation with depression has begun.

Yesterday morning I sat out on the deck reading in a very comfortable chair with a breeze and perfect temperatures.  As lunchtime approached, my neighbors seemed to have launched into a robust pool party.  There were multiple barking dogs and children with much splashing and shouting.  In between the commotion I could hear and smell the preparation of hotdogs.  Hotdogs sounded so good to me!  Fixed just the way you want them, maybe with just a stripe of mustard this time or perhaps sweetened up with some pickle relish.  My culinary life has strayed so far from the possibility of a simple hot dog.  My kids are vegetarians, my wife a celiac and me, a gastronomical gimp with no stomach capacity to speak of.  I imagined eating a whole hotdog and then felt some anger at the impossibility of the fantasy.  In the refrigerator I had a ready-to-bake, homemade gluten-free veggie lasagna and a fresh batch of baba ganousch made from an eggplant out of my other neighbor's garden -superior foods, no doubt- but a junky frankfurter squirting out of a processed white bun never sounded better.

I don't like this new normal at all.  And yet finding peace there is key.  Just give me a little more energy and a little more stomach capacity and I can get there!  In the mean time I'm going to be a little grumpy and anti-social and it will take some time to get me pried out of this chair.

The good news is that Dr. Scott took me off the Xeloda on Monday, a week early, to help my mouth and nausea recover.   I hope my appetite and energy will soon follow.  Today I'm on a 24-hour no-carb diet in preparation for Friday's PET Scan.  The idea is that you give your body no carb reserves so that when they inject you with glucose during the scan, your hungriest cells, the cancer cells, all go "nom, nom, nom" and light up a radioactive isotope in a 3D picture.  Then you have a map of where all the cancer is living in your body.  This will help determine the effectiveness of the chemo I'm on.  In a week I'll have it interpreted and we'll know some things.

One last thing I wanted to mention.  I bought myself a watch.  I've always been sort of a "watch" guy.  It is a gadget that pins you down to a moment.  Being in the moment is an important reminder and having a Wenger Swiss watch, leather strap, quartz movement, water resistant and accurate to the second with a face large enough that I can read the date on it, makes me just a little bit happy.

It's 9:27a.m. and 10 seconds on August 23 and I'm off to try and swallow some plain Greek yogurt.