Interlude while Staying Active (#23)

Not exactly a newsflash, but I have been feeling great for two whole weeks now.  And actually felt pretty good the week before that.  But then, the week before that was a chemo week.  It’s amazing to me how many people I had not suspected had cancer have come out of the cancer closet since I started this blog:  four friends and colleagues at St. Mary’s alone.  It’s almost as if they’ve been a little bit afraid to mention it because they think friends might avoid them  That has not been true for me at all.

In spite of the fearsome illness I do have a full schedule coming up:  a reading on 11/11/11 with Marian Haddad (still our best-selling poet at Pecan Grove Press) and Glover Davis (Marian’s mentor from San Diego State University.  It is not totally coincidental that the reading is on the numerically interesting day.  The weekend after that, I’ll be reading with Dr. Mo H Saidi, a Persian American gynecologist (retired) who is also a poet, and Jim Brandenburg, a poetry therapist.  Tomorrow: golf, followed by a Board Meeting for the Voices de la Luna magazine and then a meeting at the Menger Hotel with an activist Viet vet named Bob Streck.  Bob and I have only met via the internet, so this should prove interesting. 

Then, on Wednesday, Susan and I are flying to New York for a week to see a variety of shows (a musical, Shakespeare at the Public Theater and three one-acts (by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen).  Very active evenings!  During the days we’ll be at the huge retrospective of Willem de Kooning paintings at MoMA, at the Cloisters and at other museums.  And, we’re going to Occupy Wall Street! and join the Wall Street demonstrations for a bit and shout and scream and have a good time.  We will not, however, sleep in a tent in the park.  I did that while demonstrating against the Vietnam War and once is enough. We will, by the way, be staying at a better hotel than the Dixie, where I lived for much of a summer many years ago, or the Sloan House YMCA which is a threat to both physical and mental health where I stayed for a few weeks on leave from Ft. Meade, Maryland.

I’m kind of booked up for readings and other events through February when I’ll be reading at my undergraduate alma mater, Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas.  After that, well, I’ve applied for a grant to let me visit various antiwar demonstration in anticipation of a new book I’m working on.  If I get it, I’ll let you all know and you can alert me to forthcoming demonstrations or to do poetry readings in your area.  I am hoping I don’t need the grant.  Why?  Because that would mean the wars are both over and everyone has been able to stop even the terribly small demonstrations that break out from time to time.

I’ll be teaching my favorite course in the spring semester, 2012:  The Antihero in American Literature.  We’ll read books by Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Kerouac, Mason and Jong and see Rebel Without a Cause, Platoon, The Last Picture Show and one other movie.  This coming summer, my graduate class in poetry writing looms big.  Ito Romo, author of The Bridge / El Puente, will be teaching fiction the first summer session and I’ll follow that with poetry.

So, what’s this got to with a medical adventures blog?  Just this (I hope I don’t sound like Cabaret!):  no sense in sitting alone in your room….  When you have something like a cancer that can evidently be controlled if not totally eradicated, the best thing you can do is stay active, eat well, get a little exercise, enjoy yourself.

There is *some* new medical news.  The chemo drugs have pretty much caused my blood sugar to shoot up; so, each night before bedtime, I shoot 20 units of insulin into the area around my stomach… subcutaneous!  It works.  I wake up with blood sugar in the low 90s instead of close to 200.  Throughout my medical misadventures, blood sugar has been a recurring problem, but the docs know what to do about it.  The day before we leave for New York, I’ll have a new MRI and see my lead oncologist.  I suspect the news will be good.  I’ll let you know on Monday… whatever.