un bon jour

Oh, I do loves me these steroids. This 18-hour period when they are coursing through my otherwise weary veins I feel so much stronger. I actually ran 3 miles when I got home from today's 5-hour Taxol  infusion. I didn't run fast, but I didn't walk. The sun was shining and I got to work on getting my head some color; I hope soon it won't look like I am wearing a bathing cap. You wanna talk pale? I don't care what color you are on the rest of your body, if you're bald bald, your scalp looks FAKE until you give it some sun.

I do find that when I am approaching children especially, I put the hat back on. I dunno. I don't want to scare them. A hat seems silly, though, when it's hot, so I take it off, put it back on, take it off, put it back on when I'm doing my loop.  It's interesting to see for whom I put it back on. The elderly couple walking toward me? Nah. Surely they can handle this. I will note here, though, that fewer people of all ages say hello to me when I don't have a hat on; more people don't respond to my greeting. Are they giving me privacy? Maybe that's what they tell themselves, but that's not how it feels to the one who is just hoping for hello.

The adolescents I pass? You betcha; they get the hat. The other day some high school girls were parked at the light by our house and I walked up the driveway wearing a black beret. They were all shouting at me, jeering really, saying, "Bonjour! Bonjour!" They kept it up until I disappeared into the house. I thought of turning around and taking off my hat, so they would see that I am bald, but I actually thought that would be the less kind thing on my part. It would be a scolding: hey. I have cancer, doofuses. Doofae. So I just let them make fun of me. And the silly thing is that it stung a bit. Enough so that I haven't worn the beret since. Silly paula. Doofus. Doofa.

As I ran on this gloriously warm day, by the way, I kind of resented that even though I don't have breasts I still can't take off my shirt. Seems like that ought to be a perq of all this. Be like the guys out tossing the frisbee with their shirts off, flipping the chicken on the grill, washing the car sensibly half-clad.

But some very good things happened today, the tyranny of the shirts aside. My beloved sister Ellen brought me lunch at the infusion room. She walked in with a tight hat on and said, "April Fools!" I laughed -- I assumed she was pretending she had cut her hair and that was the joke. I wondered how the heck she got all her hair under the hat. And then, boop! Off comes the hat. It's perfect. She looks beautiful.

Also, we got great news about Laura this afternoon. She had a CT-scan on Tuesday, since she has been having left eye pain and swelling, a bit of a tremor, headaches on the left side, too. Enough weird stuff so that we feared the worst. Turns out that it's an infection behind her eye, visible on the scan as an area of fluid. And a round of amoxicillin ought to handle it. Can you imagine if today's news had been bad? Wow, wow, wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Had a little bit of a crying jag this morning with Dr. D, who was very tender and reassuring as she palpated every inch of my chest and abdomen looking for masses. I'm tired of chemo, scared of stopping treatment, worried about recurrence. Was the jag from the steroids, or was it the poopy sleep? Was it worries about Laura? Or merely my unvarnished weariness and fear? I don't know. I do know that it was the first time we were both there in a moment of intimate connection. I set aside my witty, stalwart self, and she set aside her expert clinical self. It was a good, hard, important moment.

Tonight I am likely to have trouble sleeping. By tomorrow I will be chemo sick again. Bone pain comes on Saturday. But right now, I feel close to well. I even have to expand my continuum of moods (see "big toe" entry for its pathetic limits) to describe it: I feel content.