A couple of milestones: on Wednesday, the blog went over 1000 pageviews (1036 as of this morning).  I realize that isn't exactly "going viral," but it feels rewarding all the same.

At then, last night, I actually slept on my left side for a few minutes.  What?  For the first two months after my surgery, I couldn't sleep in any position except on my back.  It wasn't hard not to roll over because I simply couldn't.  After a few months, my right thigh and hip were strong enough so that I could sleep on my right side, though it wasn't always comfortable.  But because all of the muscles in my leg had had to be reattached by hand to the titanium and plastic femur and ball joint, Dr. Templeton, the surgeon, said there would be too much strain for me to lie on the left side.  You can't imagine how much I wanted to roll over when I knew I couldn't.  But it wasn't a possibility because there was no muscle memory left, so it would have taken a conscious effort, and I had an image of all the muscles going SPROING and pulling loose.  I realize that was ridiculous, but still...  At the last visit, however, Dr. Templeton said that the muscles were reattaching themselves naturally (a good sign), and I could try it.  When I did, it took some effort, and then I had forgotten that my left shoulder is also weak, and so it hurt.  (Mohamed's image was of my weakened scapula shattering.)  But sometime in the night, I thought it through, put a pillow between my legs for support, eased myself over, found a suitable position for my shoulder, and fell asleep.  It wasn't quite the reward I had hoped for, but it felt like another small victory.

My friend Carol (in an earlier post, I said that she had 'complained' about not being mentioned yet, to which she gently suggested that perhaps 'noted' would be a more accurate verb) asked yesterday whether I ever felt guilty about having cancer.  I think that I missed the guilt gene.  I believe in heredity, environment, and chance--and the greatest of these is chance.  Both of my parents died of cancer, my father at 67; both my grandfathers died at 67 or 68.  So the gene pool wasn't promising.  I used to think that when I turned 68, it would be a difficult year psychologically.  Now I think I should be so lucky.  But I also recalled the story of a student I had the first year I taught at Washburn and his wife, Lee.  I helped the husband get a teaching assistantship at OU, but in the first year that the couple moved there, Lee got muscular dystrophy.  She lived much longer than is normal with the disease, gradually losing her independence, her ability to move, to swallow, to speak understandably.  She outlived her two cats, Franny and Zooey, that the nursing home in a small town near Topeka allowed to stay with her.  I used to visit her, though not as often as I should have (a small sign of guilt feelings after all).  It was so difficult: what could I say?  I just got back from Paris?  I'd seen a great new movie or eaten at a wonderful new restaurant?  Lee believed in karma and positive thinking, and so for all those years that she hung on, she thought that had she just been stronger or believed more fervently she would have overcome the MD or even not gotten it at all.  Her belief seemed to be an additional and very unncessary cruelty.  So no.  No guilt.