7-Down

I'm back from my seventh chemo treatment. I guess it was successful in that it made me feel like I'd been lightly beaten with clubs, ruined my appetite, and turned my urine a bright, sinister red color, the color of the Kool-Aid man's lifeblood. They also adjusted the copay for Neulasta, so now on top of being a pain in the bone marrow, it makes my bank account squeal. Yowzah! Still, I guess my life is worth at least that much money. (It sounds like the premise for a TV game show in a country with a large population and high unemployment - How Much Is Your Life Worth? Where host Dink Martinsyde offers you increasingly large sums of money to kill yourself in various ways, such as eating egg salad sandwiches continuously until your body rejects mayonnaise and you perish in a greasy emulsion. "Is your life worth SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS?" "Hell no!" "Well then, rub garlic toast on your scalp until you wear a hole through your skull!" Sort of like Most Extreme Elimination only without the Safety Fluid.)

Nodal sclerosing Hodgkin's, by the way, in case anyone's wondering. My "signature" in the lymphoma community would be something like "Hodgkins NS4E". But I checked my last remaining node in my groin last night (which sounds like a seventh grader's coded reference to self-stimulation (he said stimulation, a-huh-huh-huh)) and found it much reduced in size and much softer than before. I think it's about to go the way of the do-do and the carrier pigeon, and I couldn't be happier. I'm still a little scandalized by the hulking copay, but I'll get over that on my own. Cancer is something I can't get over on my own.