Yesterday Mohamed and I returned to the KU Cancer Center for the regular six-week blood work and consultation.  Every other six weeks, I have CT scans, perhaps skeletal x-rays, and a bone-strengthening shot, but this was the easy visit.  The main KU Medical Center is about two miles north, and we pass it on our way to the cancer center.  The Med Center is a huge, sprawling complex of buildings in a mishmash of architectural styles.  Although individual buildings from various periods can be attractive, the campus itself is not: it's too crowded and feels haphazardly planned.  The road we take begins as a turnoff from I-70 onto the 7th Street Trafficway.  The surroundings are industrial with huge railroads yards everywhere you look.  Although it's poor and ugly, when I first moved to the KC area, I loved coming into the city this way.  For a small town boy, it seemed like the essence of industrial urbanism.  The Trafficway changes its name, not very aptly, to Rainbow Boulevard and suddenly the Med Center complex emerges, construction always underway somewhere on campus.  Rainbow is the west boundary of the Med Center; the eastern boundary is State Line Road; cross it and you're in Missouri.

On the north, 39th Street used to contain the Med Center, but there's now a lot of construction to the north of that border.  One handy thing about 39th Street is that if you cross State Line, there are several blocks of a restaurant row, so good and various restaurants are always at hand.  To the south, the campus sort of peters out with no clear defining street.  The teaching facilities are there, as is the hospital.  Two years ago at this time, I was in my 7th day at the hospital, trying to adjust to the abduction brace and learn to climb two steps, ready to go home two days later.  Mohamed had slept in my room for those seven nights, but would drive back to Topeka this night to get us both some fresh clothes and to prepare the house for my return.

If you continue past the Med Center on Rainbow, the entire scene changes.  Like Gaul, all of Kansas City is divided into three parts: KCMO, which is which is the main city with most of the population and all of the major attractions; Kansas City, Kansas, which is generally poor; and Johnson County, Kansas, which is where the rich suburbs are.  Once you pass into Johnson County, the atmosphere is entirely different (and if you go a couple of blocks beyond Shawnee Mission Parkway, where the cancer center is located, you're in the richest suburbs of the KC area).  About two miles south of the main Med Center, you turn right off Rainbow for a block, and there's the Bloch Cancer Center.  It was originally one of the first Sprint buildings in KC, but when Sprint was experiencing better times, the company built a huge billion-dollar campus on the far south side of KC.  The Bloch family (of H & R Block), major philanthropists in KC, sponsored conversion of the building into the cancer center.  Although I still occasionally have tests at the main Med Center, it's at the Bloch building that I normally have tests and see the doctors.

The bottom floor is devoted to x-rays, MRIs, and CT scans; the second floor is where blood is drawn and where the doctors have their offices and consultations; and the third floor, which I visit only to get my shot, is where people undergoing chemo have their treatment.  It's divided into myriad cubicles with TVs and DVD players, since some patients must spend several hours getting their chemotherapy.  I signed in and was called immediately for my 12:15 drawing of blood.  That took a couple of minutes, and then we had nothing till a 1:30 appointment with Jennifer, the physician assistant.  I thought about asking whether she was available then--and should have because she was--but assumed that she couldn't see us 75 minutes before our appointment.  So we walked west across the street to a small shopping area and met our friend TJ (T.J. on his Equity card) for a very hurried lunch.  Still, we were happy to see him and happy, too, that he had made the effort to lunch with us, fast as it turned out to be.

At 1:30 we went back, signed in again, and were called to see Jennifer before we even found a seat.  She printed a copy of the tests results for the last six visits, most of which were, as usual, in the normal range, though there were several that had exclamation points and arrows (too high, too low) beside them.  The only one that seemed to worry Jennifer was the hemoglobin number, which has been too low for the last six times (all those exclamation points!) and which continues to decline.  Still, she said, we have a ways to go before we need...  Mohamed and I were nodding, not that we understood, but just to show we were following, though Jennifer assumed we knew more than we did.  We were thinking another pill or perhaps a shot, but she finished her sentence with "before we need a transfusion."  At any rate, generally the tests were good, and there were only six exclamation marks (out of perhaps 40 results) from this series of tests.  We scheduled our next, fuller set of tests and said goodbye to one of our favorite nurses (hugs all around) who is leaving.  And then Mohamed drove us home, me sleeping fitfully in the car.

Once home, I had barely enough energy to make it out of my clothes and fall into bed for two hours of profound sleep.  The rest of the evening, I was wiped out.  I had jinxed myself by telling Jennifer that the nausea had been much less frequent.  One of the most frustrating parts of the last two years has been how quickly my energy level plummets.  For social occasions, which luckily remain frequent, with some planning I can usually manage three good hours.  But then both brain and body stop working.  For physical activity, though, 30 minutes is a stretch.  It's hard to build momentum through the day when mornings are interrupted by an hour crash, and right after lunch, even though I haven't been awake for more than a couple of hours, I fall into bed for two full hours. 

We'd like to make plans for a little variety in our days--perhaps a weekend in KC (without doctors' visits) or, if SCOTUS strikes down DOMA, four days in Iowa to get married.  In the meantime, we need to get our mailbox replaced (every few years, "fun-loving" teenagers take baseball bats to the mailboxes on our road) and to get a support post, knocked out of position by a guest's errant driving, for our balcony repaired.  Little annoyances seem to take on unncessarily major proportions these days.  And then we'll think more seriously about a break.