It's Spring....

...and in Madison that means that there are promising days, and not-so-promising. The piles of filthy snow are (mostly, but not completely) gone; the street-cleaning machines seem to be getting a lot of the sand and salt out of the gutters; people are raking their lawns, which are ever-so-slightly less brown; the temperature went into the 60s over the weekend... and today it is again cold and windy and gray.

It's sort of like life. (Heck, it is life.) I had my CT scan on Friday, and saw Dr. Holen, who reported that the tumors are smaller, and some of them are no longer visible! Hooray! But I also had chemo on Friday, and the after-effects laid me low for pretty much the entire weekend. It occurs to me that I try very hard to put on the best possible face, in this blog, and when I see and speak with friends and family, and for myself, too (in fact, mostly for myself)-- and a lot of people, as a result, think I'm "courageous" (which I'm not) and (probably) also insanely perky.

So here are a few sentences describing the downside, aka this past weekend. I felt fluish most of the time--nauseous, a little feverish, tired. Pretty much all I did on Saturday was sleep and put one load of laundry in the washer. Sunday was a little better: two more loads of laundry, and tidying the kitchen. Naps. Virtually the entire Sunday Times. A couple of chapters of Drew Gilpin Faust's history of how the Civil War changed Americans' understanding of death, This Republic of Suffering. It was beautiful outside, and I really wanted to take a walk, but I couldn't motivate myself to open the door until near sunset, when I saw my neighbors, who had brought over a piece of cake a couple of days earlier, walking past the house. I opened the door to return the plate. That was the extent of my "walk." I had a brief conversation with Kim (the neighbor); she was the only person I talked to the entire weekend, except for a couple of brief phone conversations with my friend Helen. Helen and I hoped to get together, but she's an MRI tech and was on call all weekend; worked all day Saturday and until 3 AM Sunday morning, and then went back to the hospital to work some more late Sunday morning. So getting together was out of the question.

I felt physically cruddy, and extremely sorry for myself.

Today is much better. I worked out at the gym this morning; I feel good; I'm getting some work done. Filed my income taxes, for example. Wrote this entry. Am about to read another chapter of the fear manuscript. And... there are purple crocuses blooming in my front yard!

Up, down, up. It's spring.