The holidays, overall, were really good. Got to see some folks I really love, got to spend time with them. But the holidays were also right smack still in the midst of this most intense first portion of chemo/treatment, so it meant that:
- I was actively losing the last of my hair — goodbye, little buzzcut!
- A few of the support/extra programs that would normally be available to someone going through this portion of treatment weren’t really offered ’til mid/late January. I mean, I guess if it’s taken me 30+ years to care at all about how to use an eyebrow pencil, a few weeks without that knowledge (or fullish eyebrows) isn’t exactly a disaster…
- Treatment could either be right before Christmas Eve Day or right before New Year’s — I went with before New Year’s and amazingly was able to rally enough to have a good early-evening NYE with some great friends and their kiddos
I am thankful for a new year, though I’ve never really been someone to be all “screw that last year!” on New Year’s or birthdays — the way I’ve always seen it, time just keeps going, and even if it’s fun or useful to mark it off, in the past it’s seemed a bit arbitrary to celebrate Jan 1.
Time and life seem to just involve a lot of different cycles — sometimes you are aware of them and sometimes you aren’t until you are smack dab IN them. I’m aware of a lot of cycles right now. I’m at a good place in this cycle, even if I have a little cold.
Next week I’ll have the last of the “AC” cycles that comprise the first part of my treatment. I’m thankful that our original notes were wrong and that I only need 4 (not 8) of those. I’m not exactly looking forward to it, but some adjustments in medication as well as acupuncture made round #3 more deal-with-able than round #2. They helped take the “ow” out of that now. After 3 weeks to recover from the AC, I’ll be on to the second portion of chemo — twelve weekly sessions of Taxol.
Even when I’m in the midst of a considerable amount of ow, I just need to remember to do one thing at a time — the next moment, breath or step could be better, and eventually, it probably will be. Again, these are cycles, and now that I have a sense of that, it seems more doable to ride each one through.
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photo: detail of a great illustration from the AMAZING catalog for the Walker Art Center's Hippie Modernism exhibition, which will be on view at Cranbrook in June, and at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive after that
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