25 Aprile 2024
Friday night I slept 11:55 hours and last night I slept 10.35 hours. That’s how much diarrhea drains you (literally and figuratively). Not only that, my neuropathy is acting up and my hands and feet ache. I feel lethargic today but managed to clean the toilet, change linen on the bed and wash, dry, fold and put away laundry. I suspect it will be an early night tonight again.
My next big physical effort is to shower and shave. I haven’t for the last three days and I have a very pungent odor about me. Call me scruffy.
I would grow a beard but it would probably come in a mixture of white, grey, red, and black. With the chemo I’ve had, it might even glow in the dark.
I had a nice conversation with my cousin Jo on Saturday and another with my cousin Jimmie today. I don’t think we talk about anything serious but it’s good to connect. We often reminisce about our childhood and do the usual of trying to remember a name and only thinking of it 10 minutes later, if at all. We often talk of how naive we were as kids in a small town and how our views changed once we reached big cities. I certainly was and I’ve been in some very big cities since growing up in Morton: New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago.
My cousin Jo recounted how she changed when she moved to New Orleans and found a group of friends that changed her perspectives on some things. My time in the Coast Guard sent me to Alameda and San Francisco and New York and that was eye opening.
It reminds me of something Mark Twain once wrote.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Jimmie, Jo, Jean, Archie and I have certainly done our share of traveling in life. We’ve come a long way from our small town upbringing in Morton. That’s not to say we didn’t learn some bedrock principles growing up. You help your neighbor, you learn early wrong from right, it’s not nice to burn your cousin at the stake, and you learn there are no secrets in a small town.
We had great experiences in childhood even though all of us had our share of family woes. Burning at the stake aside, we shared birthday parties, exploration of semi-forbidden areas, swinging on vines, smoking cross vines, skinny dippin’ in ponds, how to make a tank out of a wooden spool, how to ride a bike without holding on to the handle bars, and many other important principles that have carried us far. Or at least kept us out of jail (even though Jimmie and I came close).
Tomorrow I plan to consult with my GP about the diarrhea. I have no idea as to its cause and am scared he will want a gastroenterologist to perform a colonoscopy on me. The prep makes me shiver. I have a sick friend in Holy Cross and I would like to visit but have been too weak the last few days to even try. There are threats of rain every day for the coming week. I need to cut and slice up a watermelon, re-clean the pool filter, and put the garbage out.
Stay tuned!