overdue

Well, I'm through making promises about my frequency of posts. I see that it's been sixteen days since my last one when I vowed to make them once a week. Oh well. I'm sure nobody was gnashing their teeth to see the latest anyway.

I've been doing quite a bit of reading, as usual. I finished Atlas Shrugged. I suppose my reaction would be a shrug. Almost fourteen hundred pages of philosophical dogma with some shreds of plot thrown in for good measure. If you're not familiar with Randian philosophy, aka objectivism, it's all about free markets and egoism. One of the characters delivers a mind blowing three hour monologue outlining said philosophy near the end of the book. I know it would be three hours because she repeatedly refers to it as the "three hour speech".  I forced myself to finish it and I'm glad I did. I hate to leave things unfinished.

I also read The March by E.L. Doctorow, The Bloody Ground, another Civil War historical fiction thing, and Treasure Island. Treasure Island was a nod back to the pirate stuff I read previously. I didn't know I had a copy of it and when I discovered it on the shelf I couldn't resist. These three books combined didn't reach the length of Atlas Shrugged and yet I found them all infinitely more entertaining.

I just finished my last round of chemotherapy this week as well. It laid me out as usual but I am so glad to be done with it. I have to start radiation on June 1 but that couldn't be nearly as bad as the chemo. Could it? Let's hope not. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I look forward to feeling better as the doctor promises.

I'm contemplating some trips. To North Carolina with Madison to see North Carolina School of the Arts and to visit my ailing Grandma, and to Southern California to visit some friends and relations. Stephanie is being great about encouraging me to travel. She knows I'm somewhat depressed and that a change of scenery might do me good. I wish I could take her with me everywhere but her job doesn't permit unfortunately.  We're still planning to go to Europe at the end of July as well. Need to pick up the steam on the planning for that one or time will pass us by. Hasta luego amigos.

The end in sight

Yesterday I started cycle seven of eight of my nasty chemotherapy. It gets cumulatively worse as far as side effects go so I've been doing a lot of sleeping since I came home from the hospital and little else. Two weeks from tomorrow they'll disconnect me from this dreaded pump for (hopefully) the last time. Hooray!

Next step is radiation again. I have an appointment with the radiation oncologist tomorrow. Apparently they're going to try some narrow beam radiological surgery thing that is aimed at controlling the tumor growing into my pelvic bone. That's the one that they believe to be inoperable otherwise so I have my fingers crossed it will succeed.

After that it's probably back onto some chemo orally along with avastin orally. The doc tells me the side effects of the oral drugs are very mild so I should be able to function fairly normally. And he promised that if they do make me sick he'd give me a reprieve for a few weeks while we go to Europe this Summer.

That's about it on the medical front. Nothing much else to report. I've embarked on a new book, Atlas Shrugged. It's about 1500 pages so it should keep me occupied for a while at least. I'm also going to start a writing class down in Chicago later this week. We'll see how that goes.

Be well and Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there.