Due to a temporal anomaly in the Writing About Writing compound, this post has been brought to you from yesterday. It is possible that tomorrow's post will be brought to you from next week, and until we can clear this up, it might be best to expect the unexpected.
Reminder: I just found out that I have cancer. And Tuesday reports are kind of going to be Cancer Update™ for a while. Treatment is about to start, so my life is about to get…funky.
Quick Personal Update-
I got back from vacation and jumped straight back into medical crap. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that medical crap jumped ME. My GI specialist (the one that colonoscopied me) called me late on Sunday night to talk about something called Lynch syndrome, which it's likely that I have. It's a genetic condition that raises the likelihood of certain kinds of cancers—including the one I have. I don't have kids, so some of the urgency was deferred, but I'll have to do genetic counseling once I'm done with surgery.
Yesterday I had a CT scan with contrast.
Tomorrow I have a procedure that will knock me out for a couple of days.
Today was just therapy, which I restarted when I got my diagnosis, just so I can have some help dealing with everything that's coming up for me.
Surgery is scheduled for Dec 16 (so I'm probably going to be out of it until at least Monday).
I'm writing a little every day, but I'm hanging on to blogging by a thread right now. One of the things I'm dealing with is just how overwhelming this has been. It's not like I come home after an appointment or the minute I get off the phone from some bad news and just hop right back into writing. Sometimes even the good news takes a few hours of being emotional to process. Today I found out I had no lung and liver involvement (which means it's not stage four, and I don't need to START with chemo) and even though that was great news, I was out of it for most of the rest of the day—just so relieved from the breath I had been holding for weeks.
Weekly Schedule Adjustments-
Tomorrow isn't going to happen because of my procedure, but after that I won't have a lot to do BUT sit around, so the plan is to get some writing done during recovery. (Incidentally, next week has "only" three appointments, but they're all on Wednesday, so I might be able to get in one more half week before the surgery.)
I'm trying hard not to just shut everything down until post surgery. I should at least have a few good days until then and next week doesn't look two bad.
Tomorrow and Thursday are probably going to involve wrapping up our latest book recommendation conversation. I badly need an admin day to go through about a billion emails. I'm hoping I can write something significant for Friday while I convalesce, but it might be touch and go.
Novel Progress-
Old Crusty 1.0 Draft: 34, 398
I'm still not getting much fiction written. What little writing time I have is going towards the blog right now.
Behind the Scenes-
I need an admin day in the worst way. I have a stack of emails to reply to that is taller than me. I would normally take a day off, but I think that just running the book recommendation, I can at least get a quick post up and then tab over to my Gmail and roll up my sleeves.
Good Luck with everything, and Thank you for always being an inspiration
ReplyDeleteVery glad to read the "no lung or liver involvement" part. A friend of mine died of colon cancer a few years ago because he waited to see a doctor about his non-specific symptoms until he got hired full-time at the place he'd been working as a contractor so that he'd have decent health insurance. By that time he had two metastases in his liver.
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