Just as the title of the scarf Claire made for me, I’m having good days, bad days.  Yesterday was a good day.  Today so far is a bad day.  I’m nauseated and jittery and grouchy.  No food is appealing.  I don’t want to drink anything, either, but I’m making myself both eat and drink a little because I can’t decide whether my stomach feels better with something in it or not.  I was grateful for yesterday, a good day – and actually ate almost a whole meal last night – knowing that I might not feel up to eating anything today.

I’m grateful that my cousin could come be with me for this last chemo treatment on Thursday and the couple of days after.  Having someone to pick up a prescription for me is nice, especially on this bad day.  So far, the worse days have been on Saturdays and Sundays when I can have a football game on television and half watch and doze and be distracted just enough that the bad day isn’t so bad.

This is me now?

I’m just over half way through this course of chemo treatments, and though there is another course to follow the surgery, it’s not supposed to be as rough.  I have so many more months of treatments and surgery that I don’t try to think too far ahead.  Just a couple of weeks at the most.  Even just two weeks away seems kind of far for me.  I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that before, except perhaps when I was a little girl.  Since being a teenager or even before, I’ve had a pretty set image of time and its passage.  But that has shifted, and the now is much more important for me than the future.  It’s interesting how illness affects that.  To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, illness is another country.  It’s a new place, different from the place I am when I’m well.  Not necessarily worse, but certainly different.  A place of good days and bad days.  And a place where I truly appreciate the good ones.