A few random thoughts after a not-so-great weekend.  After a few days of relative quiet in my G-I tract, the calm came to an end and much of the weekend was spent swallowing Imodium and staying close to home.  (Had eating an entire platter of nachos been a bad idea?)  And then every few hours, my mind and body crashed.  Life--both weeks and days--seems to go in waves: a few hours of energy (especially in the mornings), a crash that sends me to bed, a weaker wave of energy around lunch time, a bigger crash leading to a very long nap, another wave upwards, and then, as the evening progresses, less and less strength.  It's extremely frustrating and makes planning difficult--and, of course, in the back of my mind there's always the question of whether I'm sleeping more than the week or the month before, of whether the ups are less frequent and the lows more profound. 

Little problems seem magnified when I have only occasional energy to deal with them.  We have a 75# German shepherd mix, Kimber.  Saturday morning I let her out, and when next I looked, she had one of the rabbits who live under our back deck in her mouth.  A year or so ago, she eviscerated one, so I was prepared for the worst.  But luckily, when I yelled "Kimber," she dropped the rabbit, which ran off.  We bought a new sofa for the TV room; it arrived Friday after an inexplicable five-week wait.  Although it's high and firm enough that I can abandon my Archie Bunker chair and actually stand up from it (unlike the old couch, which was so saggy I hadn't sat on it since my surgery), it's much bigger than it looked in the showroom, so now we need a new, smaller coffee table.  After a couple of hours of standing in two furniture stores, one with really overeager sales clerks, all I wanted to do was get off my feet and not have to think.  We ordered one online, but of course it'll take several weeks to arrive.  The people who are going to re-tile our two bathrooms put off coming to start work from today till next week.  The landscaper is hired, but doesn't know when he'll come.  The guy who mows the lawn seems less attentive than usual.  And then on Sunday, my phone stopped working, the boot screen endlessly recycling itself.  Before I could go to the store, I had to take a nap.  When we finally went to T-Mobile, they had to order a new phone for me; in the meantime, I'm using an old, non-"smart" phone (imagine the indignity!), and I've lost all my contact numbers.  Are any of these things major?  Of course not.  Would they have been big deals a year ago?  Nope.  But now when all I want to do is plant my tuches on my new couch, have some protein- and fat-rich foods (to keep my weight up, of course), and drift off, they seem a lot more important than they should.

Adding to all this is the feeling of being dependent on others, perhaps most significantly, the consequences of almost never driving any more.  I didn't drive for the first two months after surgery because when I was in the brace, I couldn't.  I could barely get in a car.  And then I didn't drive because my right leg wasn't very nimble, and I thought I might not be able to move it from gas pedal to brake in time.  And after four or five months, I had just developed the habit of letting Mohamed do all the driving.  I'm not sure, given the sudden lows, how good my reaction times would be.  I still have to lift my right leg by hand into the car.  How smooth would its movements be if I was driving?  (The Grammar Doctor says 'was' not the subjunctive 'were' after the 'if' because it's an open possibility that I could be driving.)  Both symbolically and practically, not driving often is the major example of not being in control, of being dependent.  So 65 years of one self-image have been erased--or at least supplanted by an image that I don't like and a reality that I like even less.

And now it's time for my daily anti-coagulant shot.  And enough time has passed since the chemo pills that I can have a Krispy Kreme or something equally nutritious.  And I probably should check to make sure that there aren't any bunnies serving as Kimber's breakfast.