Time to end this year and move on to a new one unfreighted by bad omens, bad luck and bad karma. And what more fitting way to do that than to have the year go out kicking and screaming in my first chemo treatment?

I don't know what to expect. I will be under the drip for roughly three hours. They suggested that I bring a blanket, a book and something to eat. Imagine that! A medical procedure so long you have to pack a lunch! I don't think they really intend for me to bring lunch, necessarily. A few crackers or something. But still, nobody said I couldn't bring a picnic basket with fried chicken and cole slaw, did they? They also said that when (not "if") the nausea started, they would supply me with drugs to control the vomiting. With that in mind, a fried chicken picnic basket maybe isn't the best idea in the world. Maybe just an apricot or something.

Anyway, it sounds like I'll be under the drip for three hours, and from roughly the halfway point on will start to "feel tired". I interpret this to mean that from the halfway point, the chemo drugs are going to work me like an Army mule. Is the blanket for warmth, or to dampen the sobbing and whimpering? :)

Actually, I think the blanket is mostly to mop off my corpus. These lymphoma sweats are truly impressive things and the odds are that if I'm there for three hours, I'm going to have one, and I'll need the blanket so I can exploit its large-scale absorbency and thus (hopefully) not look like I just crawled out of the pool.

Maybe I should take nothing but an apricot, a bucket, my iPod, and a Sham-Wow. Write down another use for that thing!