Handbill Handout

Final treatment this morning.  Didn't believe it was real until I walked in the room and saw them ripping my name and bar code off the molded cushion for my legs.  The whole morning felt vaguely detached from reality.   Made my follow up appointment, said goodbye to the gentleman who drove me (I'll miss him terribly and will be unable to ever watch a Yankees game again without thinking of him),  and practically floated onto the PATH train. Then I got to work and reality set in but that's not particularly important or worth documenting here. 45 sessions.  It felt like a mountain at the beginning.  Overwhelming.  I guess in the "What have we learned ?" column I have truly experienced that you can get through overwhelming things by just looking at what's immediately in front of you and not at the whole process.  Cliches are often cliches because they're true. High 60s and rainy this afternoon.  It was mid 60s and cloudy when I finishe...

44 down, 1 to go as it turns out.  They say I'll hit my irradiated goal in one fewer session than originally forecast.  I'll take it. I found out that someone I knew many years ago and was again briefly acquainted with on Facebook died over the weekend.  46 years old, pancreatic cancer, from the looks of his timeline it was maybe less than a year from diagnosis to death.  Sobering.  71 and sunny, by the way.  Boy the weather works well as a welcome subject change! Nothing much more to add today.  Maybe I'll have some kind of epiphany once the sessions are actually over, though the process will be far from over.  There's a little more drug treatment in my future and then a months-long wait until I find out if this all worked.  Meantime live life as usual I guess.  As a dear friend (and war vet) told me, "Celebrate all that is worth celebrating and keep dodging the bullets". 

I've been wearing the same pair of old New Balance every day to treatment because they're easier to slip on and off without untying so I can quick change in and out of clothes for treatment.  I can't decide if I'm going to throw them out or bronze them or just put them in the back of the closet to look at and remember after I'm done.  Must remember:  Nostalgia is poison. If I have the slightest thought of romanticizing this season of my life in the trash they must go.  One week to go by the way.  A bit less because of the Memorial Day holiday.  They tell me I may even get my full dose in 45 sessions instead of 46 so I may even be done on Thursday and not Friday.  We'll see.  I'll believe it when they tell me not to come back for a month. 85 and sunny, by the way.  I've been hiding in the AC since I walked to the corner for lunch. 

Low 80s and sunny. Six treatments left to go.  Recent words of wisdom from the gentleman who drives me: "Jose Bautista went from forty home runs to shit on a stick just like that". "All these guys calling in with their ideas got paper assholes."  I still have no idea what that means and I'm afraid to do a web search. I'll miss him when this is over.  I suspect I may also miss the weekday structure that's imposed on me.  I mean I won't miss it per se but I think I'm heading toward trouble work wise because I can set my own structure and due to certain changes at my workplace (mainly the move to t his kind of disaster ) I may behave in a manner not healthy to what's left of my career.  Ah well, I've been continuously employed since the age of 16 so I'm due to be among the ranks of the unemployed.  It's only fair to both me and the kids who will benefit by being promoted in my absence.  Then again I've metaphorically ...

"What the fuck is that, a bear?"  The gentleman who drives me to treatment had just noticed a brass colored metal sculpture (it could be brass for all I know, unlikely that it was bronze) of a cheetah or leopard outside a Walgreen's in Bayonne on our way in.  "They must have that thing bolted to the sidewalk otherwise the junkies would take it for scrap metal.  You know how much money you can make from scrap metal?"  I said "Probably a lot?" based not on any practical experience but based on a subplot on "The Wire" that I had seen years ago. Low 60s and cloudy, by the way.  It's been one of the wettest May weeks I can remember.  I've gotten really really good about talking about the weather.  It's been unusual and noteworthy so far during my treatment period and it's a benign thing (see what I did there?) to discuss as the radiology folks push, pull, adjusted, mark, cover and elevate me before the zap starts.  The la...

30 down, 16 to go after this morning. The feeling of unreality continues.   My driver continues to do interesting things like admire the stonework on a rich person's house that we drive by every morning.  "That's some nice stonework" he says.  I'm inclined to agree since I don't know anything about stonework so I wouldn't know the difference anyway, plus my driver used to pave stuff for a living which means he was in a related field so I trust him. 72 and sunny.  I should probably go back to doing the weather since I haven't changed the title here. "All I'd done in better than two decades was to tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and step off" - Denis Johnson, "Ad Man", summarizing my career.

More than halfway done but still a decent amount of time (4 weeks) to go. The constant fatigue at this point gives life a soft-edged glow and the vague feeling of being adrift, floating, with occasional waves of panic crashing over one's head that are registered and reacted to and then distracted away by something because it's too tiring to be panicked for too long. Somebody's really warping that fucking plastic blue ring though.  I'm not getting it close to back to round anymore. Different guy handled my transport this morning.  An ex sales guy who talked way too fucking much and interrogated me about my life.  Eventually I took my phone out and pretended I was answering work e-mails.  I like my regular driver, a retired, blue collar guy who when we drive by this place says things like "Man, a life-sized fucking gorilla don't come cheap". Otherwise we might chat about whatever nonsense is on the sports talk radio or the wacky morning DJ's he s...