Monday, Monday...(#16)

YAWN!!!!

Monday, Monday…. 

Mondays.  Mondays are go to the doctor day.  Each Monday has a slight variation from the others in a three week span of mostly repetitive Mondays..

Today, for example, three Monday events that do not happen on the other Mondays but that do happen every third Monday..

At 9 a.m., I go to the South Texas Radiology Clinic (STRIC) on Sonterra Boulevard for a CTscan of my lungs and abdomen.  There is, as far as I know nothing wrong with my stomach, but they check everything.  This CT is with and without contrast.  So, 30 minutes in the belly of the beast, get pulled out, get shot with iodine of some kind and back in the beast’s belly again.  “Breathe In!”  “Hold!”  “Exhale!”  Repeat ad nauseam.  

11:30.  Upstairs in the same building.  I have had breakfast in the interval…had to fast for the CTscan earlier.  This time, I get punctured once more.  EVERY Monday, without fail, I go through a series of blood tests to check my white and red blood cells and my platelets and whatever else the doc wants to check.  This is always in the START Center.

2:30 p.m.  The STRIC Center on Hardy Oak for an MRI.  I love MRIs:  they take me right back to Vietnam with what sounds like fifty caliber bullets being fired from machine guns, strange sounds, Charlie creeping through the wires, a think blue line above my nose, claustrophobia setting in.  After the MRI, I go home.  I will learn nothing until next Monday.  Then I will sit down with Doc Onc1 and he will go over the results.  So far, that’s all been positive…except when we went over the first MRI and the only, so far PetScan.

Back to work tomorrow.

Actually, next med day will be on Sept. 6, a Tuesday.  That’s thanks to a federal holiday.  That day, I will also get my third Monday dripping of chemo into my veins (Alimpta and Carboplatin).  So, I will be fine on Wednesday for deans’ council and then will be depleted on Thursday and Friday, but good on Sunday for my golf foursome.

Monday, Monday…sometimes it just turns out that way…and sometimes, it’s Tuesday.

Apologies for the boring blog entry, but this kind of thing is much like war (as my Vietnam veteran on-line friend Bob Streck says).  And in war, most of the days are boring and repetitive.  What I'm counting on is that something this boring will seem much longer.  Think about Catch-22 (another book I teach in my anti-hero class some years), fifty years old this year, and, was it, Yardley's whore? and the theory that if we are bored, life is longer.