Lakeshore

My liver biopsy was clean — An amazing round of comments from you guys. Thank you, everyone. This is a hard road, and the journey is by no means over, but it just got a lot shorter and easier.

The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated — Why are tech pundits so eager to announce that the Ebook is taking over? Besides, it was only a flesh wound...

deus ex cerebrum — Science In My Fiction on the roots and roles of religion.

Divided Minds, Specious Souls — The experience of a unified mind and the possibility of an everlasting soul are connected. And there is scant evidence to support the existence of either.

Palin and Foreign Policy — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on the questionable foreign policy insights of the woman who can see Russia.

?otD: Do you know why sometimes you get frightened?

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9/23/2010
Writing time yesterday: n/a (post-op haze)
Body movement: Brief suburban walking (post-op haze)
Hours slept: 3.0 (interrupted)
This morning's weigh-in: n/a (forgot)
Yesterday's chemo/postiop stress index: 6/10 (post-op pain, fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently reading: Deceiver by C.J. Cherryh

Your Thursday moment of zen.



The garden at Viejo Rancho Lake, in November. Portland, OR © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Some very big news last night. No chemo forthcoming after all. I'm blitzed right now: taking oral Dilaudid post-operatively, seriously insomniac, and on day eight of a lower GI shutdown. My ability to assemble a cogent commentary, let alone the relevant thank yous to one and all, is well beyond my current grasp.

Nonetheless, well...

This is huge.

Cancer is much, much bigger than me. It's quite possibly the thing that will take my life some day. After all, something has to. But this cancer will not take me now, or soon. It's much bigger than me and everyone around me, but we have beaten it. As we would have beaten it even if I'd been locked into the chemo chair for another six months.

In the mean time, I have this liver surgery to get over. It's simultaneously the most and least complex of my cancer surgeries, depending on how I choose to look at all this. I need to stabilize my sleep. I need to get my lower GI restarted or I risk being back in the hospital soon. I have lots of things to talk about here on the blog, a book or two to get back to writing. And, well, life.

In this life, the cancer gods have let me walk free a while longer. Excuse me while I go laugh in the sunlight with calendula_witch, the_child and everyone who loves me.