Thursday and Friday were really tough days.  I crashed more often than had been the case before and slept longer once I had made it to bed.  I visited the bathroom so many times I lost count, even though I had no appetite and had barely eaten.  I managed a bowl of cereal Friday night, but nothing else seemed even remotely appealing.  I did manage to finish Roth's "American Pastoral," but even a new New Yorker and a New York Review of Books could hold my interest only briefly.  Mainly, I just stared into space and felt sorry for myself.

Yesterday morning, despite my earlier decision just to tough it out till my next doctor's appointment (a week from Tuesday), I decided to give myself a three-day vacation from the Votrient.  I had the oncologist's approval, and worries about possible negative consequences aside, I needed the break.  I don't think I can express how good it felt to look at the bottle of Votrient and think, "HA!  No thanks."  Whatever the physiological effects, psychologically it felt wonderful: three fewer pills.  Hopes that maybe my body would thank me too.  I don't really want nature to take its course, and there were still eight pills to swallow.  But instead of my feeling like a walking chemistry lab, for three days at least maybe some semblance of normality will reassert itself. 

Mornings are always my best time, and I felt energized.  At 11, I took a brief nap, but it was brief, and I felt good once I woke up.  We were a little slow getting organized, but by 2, we were ready to go out for a late lunch.  Usually, this involves ten minutes of wondering where to go, followed by resigning ourselves to one of the three or four places that are our regulars.  This time I knew exactly what I wanted: steak.  We usually go to an old roadhouse outside of Topka, but it's a long drive and probably wasn't open at that time, so we went to a chain restaurant.  There was fresh bread, a sweet potato not marred by sugary toppings, and what seemed to me at the time the best 8 ounce sirloin (medium rare) that I had seen recently.  (Yes, I know: by Kansas standards an 8 ounce steak barely qualifies as an amuse-bouche, but my mouth was amused, and I cleaned up my plate and thought wistfully about ordering another one.)  True, it had been 24 hours since I had eaten, so no wonder I was hungry.  But it was the first time in a long time that I actually had been hungry.  In my head, I chalked it up to the reduction of chemicals in my system.

I can't say that the rest of the day was marked by other confirmatory changes.  As soon as we got home, it was difficult to decide which was more important: finding the bathroom or curling up in bed.  (Actually, it wasn't a serious debate.  Bathroom trumps bed every time.)  By the time the day had ended, I had taken four Imodium and had gone up and down the stairs more times than I want to count.  And even though I was convinced that I hadn't really napped after lunch, when I looked at the clock, it was 90 minutes later than when I lay down.  The routine of the rest of the day wasn't all that different from that of the day before, even though I tried to convince myself that I was feeling peppier.   So today is day two of my break.  I'm hoping for a continued appetite, and after that, we'll see.  But I again had that moment of gloating this morning when I looked at the bottle of Votrient and left the cap firmly in place.

And now for something completely different: there was an article in the NYR about the well-documented influence of the Texas Board of Education on the way textbooks are written for the national market.  Most of what the article said wasn't new, but it did make one point that I found very interesting.  Mohamed has taken the two semester sequence of American history at Washburn for his general education requirements.  Browsing through the texts, I was amazed by the number of breaks in the narrative for boxes and sidebars, in addition to the expected maps and charts.  On some pages, it was almost impossible to follow the main text, and even if a student could, the experience was constantly interrupted by all the sidebars.  As an old-fashioned reader, I found it all extremely confusing.  I chalked it up, however, to my being just that: old-fashioned.  What Gail Collins points out in her article is that textbook publishers, in trying to satisfy the demands of Texas and yet include information that more "liberal" states might want, discovered that re-writing and re-formatting an unbroken narrative was extremely expensive.  Much easier and much cheaper was just adding all these sidebars and boxes, the content of which can be switched out with much less trouble and expense.  As she writes, "All around the country, teachers and students are left to make their way through murky generalities as they struggle through the swamps of boxes and lists."  Consolation that I'm not such an old fogey after all?  Or really discouraging?