Tuesday, May 05, 2009

X

X as in ten, not X as in X. Tomorrow is chemo number X, which is a nice round number but no more significant than any other number, I guess, except that I am slowly, week by week, being worn down by it all. It's like having one of those aggravating chronic chest colds that just won't to away, only chemo doesn't involve much coughing. The good news is that I can see the end from here - my last treatment should be June 3rd, which is almost close enough to touch.

These nights-before-chemo are kind of a drag. It's tempting to view tomorrow as a day off from work, and that's always good. But it's not really a day off, not in the sense of being able to do anything particularly fun. So mostly I sit here and try not to think about the fact that I'll spend a few hours tomorrow morning with a tube hanging out of my chest.

Nobody likes a whiner, but I find that on the nights before chemo, my horizons tend to draw in just a tad.

I have a terrible craving for a Bloody Mary. About six of them, actually. I don't drink very often, and I rarely have mixed drinks when I do. I don't know what it is, but the idea of a Bloody Mary is almost unendurable. I suppose I could drive up to the little store in Wittmann and see if they have V8 or tomato juice, but I'd probably have about as much luck asking them if they happened to have any uranium hexaflouride (it's a sign of life in the sticks when you can be quite sure the store has a plastic jug of Popov vodka, but probably doesn't have any vegetable juice).

Thus my deep need for a Bloody Mary goes unmet, yet again.

7 comments:

Stockyard Queen said...

I recall one time when a designer friend of mine and I stopped on the way back from Billings, MT, at The Little Cowboy Bar in Fromburg, MT. It is so tiny that you literally just have room to walk in and sit on a bar stool--no tables, and if you're standing behind the bar stools, nobody else can get by.

Jan ordered a vodka martini with olives. The bartender, a bleached-blond skank of longstanding, mixed her up a drink with some Popov and then handed Jan a little plastic pouch with two sorry looking olives sealed inside it. Needless to say, we didn't stay for a second drink.

William said...

"A skank of longstanding" - what a turn of phrase! I can practically picture the spectacle without having to know any more. Now I'm plagued by mental images of longstanding skanks handing out pouches of sad olives.

It's a classy place that serves Popov, isn't it? Popov and Generic Beer. I guess as Fight Fuel goes, it's all as good as anything.

Stockyard Queen said...

I, I'm proud to say, had the good sense to order bourbon. I also seem to recall that at that particular moment in history, the U.S. was having a shouting match with Russia, so anybody who ordered vodka in a bar in MT was instantly suspect.

Jean said...

Ohmygod. I remember that shouting match. Those of us who drank vodka regularly were supposed to boycott Stolichnaya LOL. Since none of the grocery stores in my podunk Louisiana town sold it anyway, this was not a problem.

Stockyard Queen said...

Jan, God bless her, really didn't know one vodka from another, but it's also a safe bet that there wasn't a bottle of Stoli within 50 miles of The Little Cowboy Bar.

Jean said...

hehehe well, considering that I crawled up in a bottle (a day) of store brand bourbon for 6 months after my mother died, I can't say a thing about Jan's taste in Vodka.

I also had an on again off again relationship with Jim Beam for a short time.

Now when I drink or use bourbon in cooking (both rarely, but cooking more often than drinking) I choose J.D.

Stockyard Queen said...

I totally agree with that. I got suckered into buying some other brand on a recent trip to the liquor store because the (cute) clerk told me it was better than JD and cheaper, but it was way, way too sweet. I know some people think JD is too smoky, but I like that.

I suppose you know Lacey J. Dalton's song, "I'll be Damned If I'll Go Home with a Wild Turkey Like You"?