Early last summer I made a new friend, a single mom who lives in the East Bay. We met online and for a long time our friendship was entirely based on email. We kept trying to meet up, but for whatever reason, we never could get our schedules to work out. We continued emailing throughout the summer and, later, when I was diagnosed with cancer, our friendship developed in a very wonderful way.

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Thanks to the endless construction project going on right next door to my home, one of these shows up on my front doorstep every day...

Now typically these so called “roach coach” trucks serve a wide variety of foods guaranteed to reduce your life expectancy by a factor of years. But not so this one...

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20 million of these bad boys three times a week for 48 weeks

On the nights that I have to give myself interferon, like tonight, I get sick to my stomach as bedtime approaches. Now when I rip open the little alcohol pads that I use to sterilize the needle, I get a whiff of the alcohol and have to suppress a feeling of nausea. I really hate that smell now, because it is a precursor for what is to come. Like some Pavlovian hound, I’ve been conditioned that the smell of rubbing alcohol now means that I will feel absolutely horrible for the next eighteen hours or more.

There is nothing to be done about it, so I have learned to go through the routine of self injection as quickly as possible. If I slowed down to think about it, I would likely pitch the whole thing out the window. Then there is nothing to do except post a short blog entry and crawl under the covers.

My friend, Phill, told me the other day that when this is all over, we are going to have a celebration like no other, and that I will have permission to indulge in anything that makes me happy. That was a pleasant thought. I honestly had not been thinking that there would actually be a day when all of this would be behind me. It seems like melanoma has dominated every day of my life since last September. While it is true that I will have to watch for reoccurrence for the rest of my life, this medical procedure has an end. So Phill is right. I should keep my eye on the end result. And although I will struggle through these next ten months, I know things are going to be SO GOOD on the other side.

Okay, a short one today, just to try to get back to this blogging business.

For the past three weeks, Oliver and Amélie have been seriously addicted to Club Penguin. But the other morning, Oliver came to me and asked if he could visit another website he had heard about at school called Fantage.

I said we could visit it together to see what it was all about. Essentially it is a Club Penguin clone (but with much better art and games). But readers who remember this post will understand why I had a sudden shudder of dread and familiarity when the Fantage home page appeared on the screen.



Uhhh.... Okay, Oliver, you can play here, but Papa won’t be joining you.

You hear that? That is the sound of me trying to chip the ice off of this blog. But I think I’ll have to leave it on defrost for a while before I’ll be able to update it. I’m just not in a good blog space right now.

I’ve been back on interferon for about two weeks and it is kicking my butt. At present, I lack the energy and motivation to blog. I’ve also been feeling downright gloomy. So check back in a few days please and we’ll see if things improve.