HERE we are, three weeks into the program. Did blood labs at the hospital this morning. I’ll be there tomorrow for day 4 of 12 on the Rituximab IV. On Friday I’ll finish the first 21-day cycle on the Lenalidomide. Then it’s seven days off, lather, rinse, repeat.
I won’t try to tell you it’s been a breeze but it’s been nowhere near as unpleasant as the nitrogen mustard in the arm, the Bendamustine I had in 2019-2020. Science marches on, if only we’ll allow it.
I rode to the hospital this morning. What a difference a week makes. For last Tuesday’s blood labs I got set to roll the iron piggy into the street but there was way too much accumulated ice in the driveway. I felt I would almost certainly drop the piggy onto her crash bars and then not have the footing to get her back up onto her wheels. Took Pam’s car to the hospital that day instead.
There was hardly any ice left this morning, but Pam said, I hate that you’re riding the bike. Keep your head on a swivel. Which I always do.
It was fine riding weather, 30 degrees warmer than a week ago, low-40s. It felt good to open her up on the highway and push into the sweepers at Thurbers Ave. I needed that.
Miriam Hospital’s Fain Building in the background, Cancer Center’s on the third floor.
By the time I get home 20 minutes later, the lab results are posted on my page. One thing I’ve noticed: when you go into chemo, things on your blood graphs start going straight up or straight down. Don’t ask me what it means, I just show up when they say to be there.
I’ll leave the bike home tomorrow, seeing as how I’m a little wobbly for a few hours after the IV. My head feels like a balloon on a string.
Climbed up on the roof yesterday to clean the chimney. Wouldn’t care to do that on an IV day, either.
Every day I make sure to get out in the air for a bit, if only to split enough wood for an afternoon, a night and a morning. It feels good to swing an ax. I’m just about through the well-seasoned maple. The oak burns well enough but could use another summer in the sun.
Other than that, I’m sleeping a lot. Not happy about that.
Not sleeping well, either. For the first week I had unusually vivid dreams that felt more like hallucinations. I was walking across the bottom of an ocean all night, then I was climbing Jack & The Beanstalk trees that never ended. Every time I grabbed a new handhold or foothold the tree would precariously crack and pitch and tip. A balancing act all the way up.
Sleep disturbances aren’t reported in the literature, so I have no idea what’s going on with that. What was going on. Lately I can’t remember anything at all upon waking but I know I’ve been around the world. My mind was racing, but racing where?
Sometimes it can be hard to sleep in the hours after the 9 p.m. Lenalidomide. It raises my resting heart rate. That has to be the body consciousness, I would think, the organism wondering what’s going on. This isn’t found in nature. What are you doing to me? It takes some time to drop off when all you can hear is your carotid artery thumping in the pillow.
The steroids have seriously spiked my appetite. I’m a hog wolfing down everything in sight, mixed metaphors, you name it.
Between the ears, I’m slower than usual on material that requires real engagement. It took me 3x as long to get through Crane Brinton’s The Shaping of Modern Thought, first published in 1950. My old friend the perfesser mentioned he was reading Brinton so I grabbed myself a copy. It’s a history of ideas, a philosophy of history, you might say. Reading Brinton made me want to reread (if maybe not just now) A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being and Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
For a lighter read and pure pleasure, I’m about to finish up Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. He breaks all the rules of prose form and content, or what you thought were rules. Prose as only a poet can write it. It’s lovely language. Sometimes you think he wrote off in a single sentence a chapter you would happily read.
You won’t be surprised to hear the book is so much better than the movie. Though it’s not a bad movie.
The aforementioned perfesser, BTW, had a cameo as a cruise ship captain in Mandrake’s Bon Voyage, a Phantom Sunday story published in 2013. I was working then with Terry Beatty on the Sunday side of things. Wonderful artist and a fine human being.
Captain L.K. Stanley is hosting a costume party aboard ship when he runs into three gals dressed as WWII shore patrol. Little does he know, they’re not playing dress up. They mean to take him prisoner and hijack his ship. A tip of the hat here to the all-female criminal gangs Lee Falk created, starting with The Sky Band in 1936.
In December I agreed to be a guest on the Chronicle Chamber’s 300th podcast. Chemo intervened a few days before the scheduled recording date, so I asked the Aussie blokes to collect any questions fans might aim my way at the event, I would answer them in writing when I could, which I did. When they post the article, I’ll let you know.
The Chronicle Chamber has a few file photos of me, very dated, much less gray of reality, so I sent them a selfie they could run with the piece, or not. Held up my phone and aimed my big schnoz at it.
That’s Lee Falk on the wall. For Christmas, D2H1 gifted a Nebula projection TV to my lair.
Pam got a good laugh out of the selfie, me looking out through a chemo daze. She said, You look eager. You’re very pleased to be up there with Lee Falk, even if he does seem to be scowling at you.
Tony DePaul, February 25, 2025, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
