Sticker Morning

Seidman Cancer Center

This morning Joyce and I drove up to Seidman Cancer Center in Orange Village, where I got to "enjoy" a couple of needles: one to extract some blood, another to insert one of the meds I'm on (it's a bi-monthly shot), Xgeva, in my triceps area. (As the Beach Boys once put it  (with a minor pronoun and verb tense change), "And I had fun, fun, fun ...."). (Link to Beach Boys singing "Fun, Fun, Fun.")

The drive up I-271 was a different kind of fun--the kind that exists only when you arrive, when you can exhale (finally) and say: I'm alive! That freeway was filled today with about every variety of human (?) jerk.

• Drivers who ignored the posted speed limits (55) and were easily going 70--or higher.
• Drivers who refused to allow other drivers (uh, me) to shift lanes near the exit (we made it by the hoary hairs of my chinny-chin-chin).
• Drivers who seemed to determined to visit the other lanes, not intentionally but inattentively, drifting here and there (and in places those lanes are narrow: It's been a major construction zone since, oh, WW II). Must have been some important texts they needed to attend to.
• Drivers who forgot their vehicles are equipped with turn signals.
• Drivers who ... are ***holes.

The return trip was a little bit better--not much. But we're alive. Though I do have even more white hairs than I did two hours ago--which is saying something.

While I was checking in at Seidman, I chatted a little with one of the women who always check me in. She told me I was looking pretty good (I haven't heard that since, oh, about 1961), and I told her whenever I came up to Seidman, I was enormously humbled by all the quiet suffering surrounding me. 

And later, when I was leaving the blood-draw area (right near the check-in), I told her that every politician should be required--before he or she takes office--to sit in the Seidman waiting room, dawn to dark. No phones, no companions. Just sit there ... and take it all in. (She vociferously agreed.)

So ... the blood draw provided a sample for them to test my calcium level, for Xgeva's function is to transfer calcium from the bloodstream into the bones, for another major med I'm on, Trelstar, fights my metastatic prostate cancer (it's in my bones)--but it also weakens the bones. So I take 1200 mg of a calcium supplement every day--and get this (painful) shot periodically.

As I said at the outset, Joyce came with me. I'd told her she didn't need to--I was just getting an injection--but here's what she said: I would worry every moment you were gone.

And that, my friends, is LOVE ... the best medicine ever invented.