The first thing I want to say is that I continue to feel much better these days. My bounceback from this last round of chemotherapy is progressing much more swiftly and smoothly than it did from my 2010 chemo series. My mental energy is very nearly 100%, and at least up to a point, my physical energy is strong. I sleep well, get things done during the day (including basic housework etc. — which was impossible for me for months), am productive in my writing and have the time, energy and focus to parent the_child.

But still with the spoons... Some days I wipe out early and sleep long. As happened yesterday. It's tied to how much I've done that day, and fairly specifically to how much driving I've done. For example, yesterday I had lunch with a friend on the southwest end of Portland (far from Nuevo Rancho Lake), then yesterday evening I drove the_child up to northeast part of town (also reasonably far from Nuevo Rancho Lake) for a long, late session with her eighth grade project mentor. By the time I got home around 7:45 I was staggeringly tired, and I was lights out at 8:15.

I'm not sure if the driving is the specific factor that exhausts me, or if it is just a proxy for my overall level of activity. Days when I stay home and lay low, I can stay up til 10:00 or so, sleep six or seven hours, and be fine. This is pretty close to my ordinary behavior when I am at baseline health. Days when I am out and about look a lot more like yesterday, with noticeable fatigue, early bedtimes and hard sleep.

And of course, because I feel fine, I rarely remember to take this fatigue into account. It's not like while I was on chemo, when every spoon spent was painfully obvious. (For more on spoons, see here: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ].) So I barrel through the days as if I'm healthy, then have a wipe out lottery in the evenings.

Still, a vast improvement. Still, annoying.

And on an unrelated note, last night I dreamt I was at a big potluck picnic with, among other people, daviddlevine. At one point I approached a cold case someone had set up filled with desserts. (It suspiciously resembled the dessert case at the Sellwood location of Papa Haydn's.) Except that one of the items on display was a sort of box made of head cheese with pickled jalapeno inclusions among the organ meats. Small items of patisserie were in various compartments of the head cheese box. I could not even begin to imagine the point of that presentation, and was fairly grossed out about it.

Ah, my dreaming mind, such a lovely landscape it is.