Tom Sawyer

never once asked Huck Finn, so, how you feelin' today?

what a stupid question when you're ten years old.

how'd you sleep? what do you mean, how'd I sleep? I ran until I dropped, in an unimaginably uncomfortable position, totally lost consciousness for ten hours, woke up and started running some more.

how's your diet? are you eating ok? well, I've been thinking of playing around with my ratio of Ring Dings to Devil Dogs, see if that helps me feel any better...

are you getting enough exercise?

I don't know what it's like being ten now, in the world of XBox360...that might be a valid question. when I was (not) growing up, and probably even more for Huck and Tom, it is like asking, are you getting enough air? motion was the medium a kid's life was carved out of.

how's your regularity?

the other kid would look at me and say, "what's wrong with you?"

I'm pleased to report that, in my present circle of playground buddies, that question would still get the same response. but though I forget which movie (one with old people becoming young), I remember well the last line spoken by an octogenarian character:

"I'm going to the bathroom.

wish me luck."

I said to myself, n.b. this is what's ahead.

at thirty, we might have greeted a friend after a spell of absence with some form of, so, how you doin'? how's it goin'? how you feelin'?

good, good. fine. hangin' in there. I'm ok.

13 seconds tops.

in ensuing hours of conversation, there might be a short roll call. "did you hear about Doug, he got drunk and was in that horrible car accident...can't believe Jerry Garcia is getting grey hair, what's the world coming to? so Johnny Carson died, pretty weird..."

the point (as if I needed one, because this is my medical blog, thank you very much) is that reporting about my health these days takes a long winded computer supported wordstorm.

better still, I need the model of the NYSE.

"at closing today, sore throat was up 1 and 3/8, shoulder pain down a half, SCM made a solid gain in the morning but finished even. panic selling led to a precipitous drop in vocal ability, while fatigue continues its steady growth."

I am so on the downhill side, seeing the end of the woods if not out of them. the worst predictions did not come true and seem increasingly unlikely, and I have not yet cancelled anything during the radiation for not being able to do it.

so I think it makes plenty of sense for this to be a fine time for me to say: I have been losing ground in a batch of major indices for what seems like a long long while, I feel the worst I have since the radiation started (by a little), and I'm more than a little tired of it.

ouch, dammit!

can I have just a moment, instead of always being grateful that I "only" lost this instead of that, to say that I notice I'm not a healthy ten year old, a busy thirty year old, a nicely working fifty seven year old anymore?

I'm not a hundred percenter anymore. some stuff will never come back. and I don't know how much.

and however long it is til I can taste food again, and dry mouth goes away, and the scar hardly shows, and the lymph swelling stops giving another layer of turkey to my neck, and I can turn my head comfortably and I can lay comfortably and I can sleep uninterrupted and the cough goes away and an hour and a half five days a week isn't spent going to radiation, and I can leave town for a few days, and I can go outside without sunblock 2000 and radiation dermatitis cream three times a day, and I am only as tired as I make myself, and exercise makes sense again, and I can go back to low fat food, and I don't feel some kind of odd radioactive debility, and I can sing again...

well...I could never really sing...

but, however bloody long that takes is still too bloody long.

the girls have been amazing about adjusting their lives to living with a spook. but they are ready for me not to be a dimmer more fragile version of me as well, I suspect.

it is the very fact that I have five treatments left, a weekend, then two more, that this six month health phase of my life is going to start phasing out in just a week and a half, that makes it possible for me to take a second and say...this has not been my favorite movie, and I'm ready for it to have a happy ending.

and tighter editing.

ptui.