code bleccch

Oh, dear. No appetite for the last three days. Doesn't it seem like, once the poop parade marched through, the body would want to restock its shelves? Not so. And my energy is flagging, accordingly, to the extent that I don't even want to repair the damage caused by that collision of metaphors.

The small tragedy is that we have enough food in the house to feed everyone who has brought some. Here is a shot of our fridge, which doesn't even show the bottom two shelves, barely closeable, that are filled with fresh vegetables and fruit. Overage of the latter is on the kitchen table, to our right. This is the pile after I cut up a big pile of apples to sauce them (see partial pile, below)-- a frantic attempt to put my little sandbag in front of the flood. 

We are two people. Only one of us has an appetite, and that is mostly for salmon, chicken, beef, anything that once had a face. If one law of the Universe is that yin must coexist with yang (say yahng, people; not YAYNG. I beg of you. If one thing comes of this cancer, let it be that my blog readers say YAHNG), It put Laura and me in the same household to underscore Its point. My desert island survival foods would be nuts and berries, maybe an avocado tree. Give me a pen, paper, and a Kindle (to be stranded in the 21st century is my plan), and I'll be happy. For Laura, give her a knife and a few slow-moving animals who mate often enough to keep her supplied with meat. She might want an avocado tree, too, and maybe her iPhone, but that's it.

But now even nuts, berries, or this fresh hot applesauce have no appeal, and as a partial result I have little energy. I'm not sure how much of the energy problem is directly from the surgery, from the emotional loss of my breasts, from the lack of exercise, from lack of food. I don't know how much of it might be that I don't know if I'm done with this cancer, or if it's done with me.

To end on a positive note, my sleep has been better than before the mastectomies. And not just on the nights when I was knocked out by dilaudid (curse you, dilaudid! my poop nemesis, now defeated). I have been off meds for two nights, and I sleep. Mind you, for two years straight I have complained about rotten sleep. Now if some miserable 50-some-year-old woman asks me what I did to remedy the sleep problems of menopause, I will explain that, well, I took some pretty drastic measures. How far are you willing to go to get some good sleep, I will ask her.