Indolence Becomes Me

Deborah thought I should put some pictures on my blog. I hadn't really figured out how to do that before, but she said it would be easy. It was, although I haven't figured out how to position them. The one on the left is a picture of me hooked up to the chemo drip with Howard by my side. The other picture is of me and Dr. V.

The first weekend after chemo isn’t so bad. Thursday night I was slightly panicked as I was beset by nausea despite the medications, but I rode it out and didn’t actually throw up. I was still on pain meds for the port insertion, but I was able to phase those out by Friday. I spent the Friday reading and playing the banjo. Peggy and Harry showed up because Harry had a gig with Red Brown and the Tune Stranglers. I wasn’t able to stay up past 8 pm, I was so tired. I went to sleep almost immediately, then woke up at 3 am and pottered around for a couple of hours. I went back to sleep at 5 am and slept until 9:30, quite an amazing accomplishment for me, basically 11 hours of sleep. Plus I had a nap in the earlier in the afternoon. It felt great.

I moved slowly through the day, staying in my pink pajamas. I was tired, a little dizzy, but basically I felt pretty good. Peggy and I visited. She was kind enough to put some strings on my ukulele so I’m ready to start playing that again.

It turns out indolence becomes me. I could get used to this pace of life. It’s 8:30 and I’m ready for bed again. I called Deborah this evening. She and I hatched a plan to go to Mexico when I’m all done with chemo. That will be a while from now, but I may be out of a job at that point anyway and will have the time to do it. Vamos a la playa. Sounds good to me. I’ve been so driven for so long.

I never wrote about the celebration on Tuesday, but it was fun to see everyone again. I wrote a proposal for to get Clackamas County to pay for transitional housing for people coming out of prison and jail and much to my surprise, the powers that be decided to go for it and in record time. They not only funded transitional housing to the tune of half a million dollars per year, they also funded a recovery mentor program, based on the model that Central City Concern pioneered. I worked with the Recovery Association Project and met with the Clackamas Core Team to get this project underway. We wrote the proposal to get the county to issue an RFP (request for proposal) and then looked for organizations who could actually run such a program since RAP wasn't in that sort of business. (We were in the business of advocating for recovery resources, not running programs.) We got MACG organizations involved, did some political agitating, staged an action, met with a lot of people, did a bunch of research, and by golly, it's happening. So on Tuesday we made some speeches and congratulated ourselves and then went home. I was sad to think that I would miss our next RAP core team meeting next Monday, but I’m if I’m feeling up to it, I’m going to go. It’s just too great a group to miss. I'm just so proud to be a part of this group. We've all worked incredibly hard and many people will benefit.