Janie, welcome home to Nawth Carolina rom the wild West Virginia highlands, and to Mom's estate as well! I yam sorry you got an allergy and a pre-pubescent diamond!

Today I was going to have more chemo infusion but my WBC was low and they couldn't proceed. So a whole mess of phone cons was necessary to recast the schedule. I will have my port placement on the 3rd and bllod tests and the next chemo session between then and the 11th.   

Man you should the waiting room outside the Infusion center at UNC's Cancer Hospital. It's a big waiting room full of comfortable chairs full of mostly creaky looking folks waiting for infusion related appointments. I am one of them, looking a little creaky myself, I suppose, but buoyed up by the eternal spring of youthfulness imbibed at Mom's table. Anyway, they are so many you would think that cancer had become AMerica's new favorite indoor sport.    I am grateful my own case is relatively minor, so far, and was early detected and local. Some of these folks are walking around in meat-shells that have been systemically invaded and are marching gloomily down the end zone. Or they --perhaps even worse -- don't KNOW whether they are getting worse or better, and are caught all day between the fiery flippers of hope and despair. Their faces range from mellow determination to subdued panic to grim denial and dogged persistence in spite of overwhelming odds. And there are so many of them. Inside the wing, once you are allowed in from the Lobby are scores of comfortable chairs dedicated to phlebotomy and infusion where you can sit and have your blood sucked by the very best equipment or have you system loaded up with the most ferocious anti-cancer chemicals, all the time placing your fate in the hands of people barely old enough to drive--technicians and nurse-practitioners and RNs and coordinators and phlebotomists and what have you.

Mostly, they are competent and caring and kind and draw no complaints from me. It is just an odd mass ceremony, the wearty elders being shunted through the stainless steel and plastic tubing rituals and placed in the various traditional positions and put through the dance-steps while they invoke the polysyllabic chemical deities by name. On prancer! On Dancer! On cis-platin and pembrolizumab! On Gemcitabine!

ANd laying my finger aside of my nose, with a wink and a smile, up Mom's chimply I goes! But I offer you this, ere I vanish from sight: Happy New Year to All, and to All a Good Night!