Restart

I haven't done much around the house in the last few years. It's hard to attend to various jobs, tasks and chores when your sternum has just been sawed apart, or when you're so messed up from ESHAP chemotherapy you hallucinate that all your skin has fallen off, or when the tandem bone marrow transplant renders you so weak you can't walk twenty feet without stopping.

But I'm feeling much better these days, and I'm starting to do more things. I still get pretty tired if I do too much, and I still have occasional outbreaks of the blackest sort of depression - a gift of chemo, I'm sure. But I try to work through these things, and by and large I succeed. There are still things I can't do very well because my leg is uncooperative, and I don't have a whole lot of cardiopulmonary reserve yet. But I try.

I'm trying to emulate our neighbor, Doug. I'm not sure where Doug is from. Oklahoma, judging from his accent. But wherever he's from, he's tough. He isn't a big man by any means, but he's tough and he just won't quit. Something happened to his shoulder and he's basically lost the use of one arm completely, but he still goes up ladders and drags bales of hay off the top of his haystack with only one functional arm. I'm not sure I could do that. Not because bales of hay are too heavy, but because I have acrophobia and find the experience of being on top of a tall ladder most unpleasant.

As Justin McKee would say, "He's tougher than boiled owl."

I'm not as tough as boiled owl. But I'm trying.