Cancer, shmancer, abi gesund.  I can still say that, though I know there'll be a moment when I'm not so casual about it.  For the moment, I feel as if I'm in, as I said, a holding pattern or, to borrow a religious metaphor (not fair, I know, for an atheist) limbo.  All of the discomforts that I've complained about come from the consequences of what happened before I started the chemo (the problems with the left shoulder because the cancer had destroyed a large part of the scapula, but with chemo, radiation, and therapy, that seems to have stabilized, and the problems with the right leg, but now I have a titanium and plastic femur and ball joint, so there's just the stiffness and the inability to perform certain actions) or from the side effects of the medicine: fatigue, elevated blood pressure, and diarrhea.  I've gotten better at powering through the fatigue; instead of three naps a day, I'm down to one 90-minute sleep in the afternoon.  I take three medications to keep the blood pressure in check, and they seem to work, though of course they have their own side effects.  The diarrhea is the most debilitating.  There are days when I don't feel as if I can leave the house, and I never leave without a supply of Imodium (with its own side effects).  But it's embarrassing to write about and not all that pleasant, I"m sure, to read about.

Other than those problems, I feel pretty good, haven't changed too much physically, and am cheerful.  As one of my friends from California asked yesterday, "Are you sure you're really sick?"   And sometimes I'm not.  A month or so ago, I asked the doctor whether I could take a break from the chemo just to give my system a rest.  I was thinking of a month or so but asked more modestly for a two-week break.  The doctor looked horrified.  "The most we ever allow is three days," he said, "and then only if the patient just can't support the chemo."  So much for that idea!  I may feel like a walking bundle of chemicals, but the chemo is obviously doing what it's supposed to, and I know that I'm very lucky that it is and that I can take it orally.

Still, for someone who's always thought of himself as energetic and adventurous, the limitations are frustrating.  I've cried only once in all of this ("shed a tear," as my mother would've said, not sobbed).  I was watching a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations," this one set in Paris.  I've spent so much time in France and feel so at home there that the thought that I'd never go back again caused some tears to trickle down my face.  I know: many people save up for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris, so I really have nothing to complain about. 

The days here in limbo have settled into a routine.  I don't get bored, and the days don't seem long.  But I do feel as if, since I still have my health, and abi gesund, I should be doing something more important or creative or meaningful.  I don't know what that would be or where I'd get the energy to do it.  What I'd really like is totally irrational--not only to do, but to know: I'd like to know where on the trajectory, the arc of this disease I am.  I count the months.  Everyone of us is on the same trajectory, and almost none of us knows where we are.  So I know my question is unanswerable.  As Eliot said, "We're all dying . . . with a little patience."  But I'm not very patient--in this case, not for death, of course, but just for a sense of my place on the arc.  If I knew, would I do?  I don't know.