Anniversary

It's been almost exactly one year since I got out of the hospital after my tandem bone marrow transplant. The tandem bone marrow transplant didn't quite kill my cancer, but subsequent radiation treatments apparently got the job done - at least for now, and these days I don't look any farther ahead than my next PET scan.

This was my hospital room. Note the potato chips, which I couldn't bear to eat, and the pile of model magazines. The red octagon stuck to the wall identified me as a "fall risk", and it's there because somewhere on the lower left side of the mural painted on the wall is a smooth hemispherical dent I made in the wall with my head when I passed out. (One of my chemo drugs caused my blood pressure to hover somewhere around 90 over 50, and that was while I was lying down. Once I stood up to use the facilities - I find those jug-like "urinals" undignified - and passed out cold on my feet and bounced my head off the wall on the way down.)

I don't dwell on it too much these days, because I really do feel frightfully good and I prefer not to waste too much of my time and energy on cancer or its treatments. But it did seem suitable to at least make a passing reference to this particular anniversary.

I did a lot of writing on the laptop, visible beneath the purplish vomit bucket, but none of it was very good. Chemo has a lot of weird and unpleasant side effects, but the most unpleasant side effect, to me anyway, was the way it destroyed my ability to read and write. I could read individual words and know what they meant, and I could type lots of words and know what they meant, but I couldn't assemble words into any kind of context. I was unable to extract any meaning from anything I read, nor could I express myself in writing, even though I knew perfectly well what each individual word meant.

All told, I spent about a quarter of a million dollars out of my own pocket fighting cancer. I don't regret spending the money - it was either that or die, and I wasn't too keen on the dying part. But now that the memory of cancer is fading, I find myself saying things like "Well, gee whiz, how come I can never afford to go on cruises like all my friends?" And then I remember why.*

But I'm not complaining. It turns out that just being alive is pretty cool.

*If you're wondering, no, my employer didn't provide health insurance, and the health insurance I bought privately turned out to actually cover next to nothing, and I made too much money to qualify for any kind of government assistance or charitable grants. For a while I couldn't get insurance at all, but now one of the provisions of the "Obamacare" that people screech about allows me to get insurance despite my pre-existing condition.