Image: My family/friend cheering section from the last day of treatment
I have not been feeling well enough to sum up the last week and a half. For a brief window of time today, I did!
Last week was busy, as I had three days’ worth of appointments that resulted in the surgery to install a G-tube in my stomach so that I can take in nutrition. I’m glad that timeline was so accelerated: at the beginning of the week, I was still able to drink and swallow. By the end of the week, I wasn’t to do either and the G-tube has been my only way to take in water, meds, and protein/calorie drinks.
I have not found much annoying or uncomfortable about getting or using the G-tube. I was warned that I would come out of surgery in a lot of pain, but not so much. Using it has been easy and has reduced an enormous amount of stress I was having about not being able to eat. The trick will be finding out how to find enough hours in the day to do feedings that will get me back to my regular fighting weight : )
All of those appointments had to be scheduled around my final week of radiation and chemotherapy appointments. On Thursday, 3/27, I rang the celebration bell after my last chemotherapy appointment, and the next day I rang a different bell after concluding my radiation treatments. (Here are some pics and a video from Thursday; here are some pics and a video from Friday.)
Radiation treatment has a time delay effect. For the two weeks after radiation treatment ends, patients often continue to accumulate new side effects. My doctors did prepare me for the fact that the two weeks following radiation are often the worst.
So, I’ve been in that valley this week. I was excited to be done last week and to see my family come out to support me. By the weekend, things became very painful, with a myriad of symptoms that I’m just managing from hour to hour with different medications. I can’t talk; I can’t sleep laying down (or, sleep very well at all), and I can’t sustain energy to do much beyond taking a shower. Many of the things that I really love about life — talking, sleeping, eating — are difficult or impossible. I have a final check-up appointment with my chemotherapy team tomorrow, and after that my doctors won’t be seeing me unless I need them to for about three months.
Jenn is getting used to (maybe?) the weird, made-up hand signing that I’m doing on a regular basis to communicate. It’s been an enormous benefit having her here with me. Her humor, her patience, her willingness to help, and her respect for my own agency have been invaluable.
I’ve found myself on the web looking up things that I want to get excited about in the coming weeks or months: looking at new (single speed) bikes, pricing Amtrak ticket prices, eyeballing every small venue in the city for concerts that I don’t want to miss this fall, planning out my next five or six books to read. I’m just in full lizard brain mode here, anything that makes the pleasure centers of my brain light up for a moment and forget what’s going on around me.
Additionally, I am going moving through two different books to decide which I will teach in my Composition II class this summer. One is a book that had such a big impact on me last year that I bought a copy for everyone in my family for Christmas — Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again by Johan Hari (I really can’t recommend this one enough). The other book gets released next month, and follows the work of two scholars I’ve been following for a while — The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna (I was able to the get an advance review copy).
Both of these books could work well. Our Comp II is a class about structuring arguments and developing collegiate research skills, so either book will give students plenty of trajectories for analyzing sources and developing their own research questions. It’s been a number of years since I last taught an asynchronous online class (I much prefer synchronous ones), but being able to develop materials and build community with my students from home is going to be much more my speed come the end of May.
I am watching the Atlanta spring unfold outside my living room window. Kids walking back and forth to school, my neighbors in their yards, and our massive pollen count (which I’ve been able to skip). I look SO forward to rejoining all of that activity in the coming weeks and months.
