Thoughts near the end of radiation

Near the end, or at the beginning.

One more radiation session to go. We will go in tomorrow for the last one, unless, as is predicted, there is an ice storm. Then we’ll go on Tuesday. This episode in our lives started 63 days ago. Thirty-nine trips in, 3 cancellations (snow, ice, sick). So where am I?

First, I have finally realized that this experience has been one of ‘going into the zone.’ The zone is where you go when you focus intently on something for an extended and regular period of time. I have gone into the zone on every book project I have undertaken. It is always hard to enter the zone but once inside the zone organizes things for you. I decide when to sleep, what to eat, what to wear, what projects to take on, all based on the zone. How will it affect what I do every morning? Inside the zone, things are relatively ordered. There is a kind of energy in there that doesn’t exist outside the zone. To people outside the zone your being in it is both slightly troubling and an easy source of concern or pity. People ask How can you do it? Doesn’t it get old? Well, no, it doesn’t. And as my brother-in-law Jack once said about something else demanding (mortgage payments), You just do it. I have watched the countryside, studied it with my gps (fun to follow the profile of how high and low the road reaches), listened to music, sat quietly, talked intently, chatted a bit with other patients at MOHPA, taken my session, queried the therapists about the machine, the process, the numbers, and a bit about their lives, usually their weekends.

The problem, I realized on Friday, is the common problem of the zone—coming out of it. All of a sudden the daily routine, the ordering of energy and time, is gone. Not only do I have to have a new routine, about work, and everything else, I have a new, scarier, sense of ending. For the radiation, the end is tomorrow. After the sessions, the end is the every-three-month psa test to see if the radiation worked. If it didn’t, I’ll be back in for something else. I’ll get back to this in a bit.

Second, what are the physical effects? Well, I began this series of treatments under the assumption that I would be dragged-out exhausted at the end of them. It hasn’t really happened. I don’t have the same pep, the same willingness to go do something that I did before. For instance today would be a great day to snowshoe on the creek. Several weeks ago that was a no-brainer—nice day, let’s get out there. Today I think Well maybe. It is tougher to get up for extra stuff. We periodically talk about going out to eat, but then it is so much easier to eat on the romantic porch of Chez Riordan overlooking the lake. We talk about the movies, but frankly it is easier to not go. The biggest physical effect has been a hemorrhoid (which I have also learned to spell easily). I am now taking baths in baby shampoo, using Tucks and Anusol, and eating what is called the destress diet—white bread, white rice, yogurt, cereal, ice cream, process vegetables, canned fruit. But that baby hurts. I finally bought a doughnut pillow. As a result of eating those foods, I can’t lose the 10 pounds of stomach that I would like to lose, but that might come when walk-to-work season starts again in a few weeks. The daylight is long enough for safe walking but the ice on the streets and sidewalks is something I don’t mess with any more.

The other physical effect is the lupron result. I have detailed this elsewhere so won’t go into it here, other than to say the libido is gone. I have not been particularly emotional nor have I had hot flashes, nor have I watched any chick flicks. I had my second shot on Friday, a three-month shot, so there is little point in checking my psa now because the lupron and radiation will have it near zero.

Then, third, there is work. I have found it easy to get into the job when I get into the office. The way I do the job, there is a lot of email contact and so when I sit down to check email there is plenty to do right away. And like all computer time after I type away for a while suddenly a couple of hours are gone. I am trying to set up my work so that I manage facilitators instead of facilitating all the groups myself. That required a lot of my time during January but now is running, we’ll see how well as the semester goes on. At the same time the job grows and continues interesting. Amazingly, to me, I was asked to sit on the Provosts Council, so have at least a voice in many of the university’s issues and directions. Like I say, amazing. This the guy who decided thirty some years ago not to become an administrator because they spend so much time in meetings.

Fourth is the What next? issue. I haven’t spent much time on Why me? or What if I die? but, well, you can’t have this condition and not reflect on things like this, at least the second one. The first one I have never dwellt on. What is, is. I have said before, I am not afraid of the death question, but with it out there, I have asked other questions, to which I don’t supply very good answers. The key one of course is should I retire? I like the job and the people I work with. I can see an effect from what I do both locally and even statewide (in some very limited circles). That’s nice. I love it. It has allowed me to redo my sense of my past, to let some issues go (and I must say, they are gone), and to see my abilities in a new way. I like this contributing to the public good.

But, I will be 65 in 39 days. How long am I going to do this? How long do I do the get up, go to work, come home, sleep routine? Where could my photography go? Where could we travel to? I can think of lots of places to see and lots of photo series to take. I have started reading again after a long layoff. How would it be to move to the Twin Cities, to be an easy part of daily, or at least weekly life there? We could afford a month in Italy, what would that be like? What would a month in New Mexico or South Carolina or Georgia be like in January? What is a life of hanging out like, sort of a return to college days without the pressure of producing stuff? For that matter what would the pressure of producing some of my little pet projects be like? We have this window now. It could end tomorrow. Clark was fine in June, then the damn stuff metastasized and took him. (Every day we drive past Hudson. Every day it hurts.) So, I don’t know. What I do know is that I, we, will handle tomorrow and the days after. This experience has been a challenge and a revelation. I can do it. So here we go.