Back again after a very long silence.  Yesterday was the regular trip to KU Med, this time for blood work, CT scans, a consultation, and the very expensive blood-strengthen shot.  All of this was scheduled later in the day than usual, a fact that meant that I couldn't eat anything until after the scans.  After a couple of years of saying that I couldn't even drink anything except water, I finally did learn that coffee is okay, so that at least helped.  The blood draw now takes place in the same place as the scans, which means that I'm not in danger of having Marci as my phlebotomist.  I don't know why but this time they took five vials of blood rather than the usual three.  It's a quick and painless process.  Next I drink two large cups of "water" (I'm still not convinced, despite what they say, that it's nothing but water).  Instead of waiting where I usually do in a cold and uncomfortable corridor, I got to go back to sit with Mohamed in the warmer and larger general waiting room.  Unfortunately, the computers weren't working at full capacity, so I had to wait for over an hour for the scans.  (These days can't be fun days for Mohamed, who not only does the driving but has to spend hours just sitting and waiting--and watching TV shows on his phone.) 

The scans go quickly and aren't difficult, much less so than, say, MRIs.  And then I could finally eat, so we walked a block and a half to a First Watch, where I gobbled eggs benedict à la Florentine, fried potatoes, and fresh fruit.  There was still another forty minute wait before we saw Dr. Van.  The blood work was all good, and Dr. Van was optimistic, but because the computers were running so slowly, the results of my scans weren't available.  I checked My Chart this morning, but the results still weren't available.  The doctors' reports when I read them are so full of doctor-ese that I can rarely understand what's being said.  I can at least understand the size of the tumor and whether it's grown.  Dr. Van didn't seem worried.  I'll do another post if there have been any major changes.  Otherwise, the schedule of three weeks on the Votrient and one week off seems to be working well.  The G-I problems have almost complete disappeared, though the level of fatigue remains the same.

July is a month of anniversaries.  On le quatorze juillet both France and I aged another year--the big 7-0 for me.  As I said earlier in these blogs, my father and both grandfathers died at 68, so I used to think that would be a difficult year.  Then after the diagnosis and prognosis, I thought, well, that's one thing I won't have to worry about.  And now 68 is a thing of the past.  The next day marked the 8th anniversary of meeting Mohamed face to face for the first time after a lot of Skyping.  (We're hoping those sessions aren't in the NSA cloud somewhere.)  And this Friday we celebrate our second wedding anniversary. 

A friend gave me a copy of Harper Lee's novel "Go Set a Watchman," a truly terrible work.  The first hundred pages are as overwritten, pointless, and tedious as anything I've read recently.  Then, over a third of the way through the book, there's a crime, and I got my hopes up.  But, no, it's absolutely irrelevant to the "plot" of the novel and is quickly dismissed.  There are long, ungainly passages of exposition and dialogue that is like nothing that's ever been spoken.  The marketing for the novel was clever, but totally misleading: supposedly, Lee submitted this work and was told to re-write it from the point of the child.  But "GSAW" has almost nothing to do with "To Kill a Mockingbird."  There is one page where the story of "Mockingbird" is "alluded" to (it can't really be an allusion, since "Mockingbird" didn't exist yet).  Atticus Finch is a virtually minor character in this novel.  If anything, the novel is a bildungsroman about Jean Louise (a/k/a Scout), but her development is so confused and the plot so thin that her growth is incoherent.  One moment she is sickened by her fellow Alabamans, but soon she agrees with Atticus that Blacks are inferior, can never be educated or integrated, etc.  But still, they're "human," she argues.  Her defense of the South is based on the Tenth Amendment (states' rights).  Atticus and his doctor brother seem to base their defense of the South on the premise that the Civil War and all that followed had nothing to do with slavery, but rather on the South's right to preserve and protect its heritage.   But none of this is coherently developed or in any way integrated into what story there is.  If you want to read a powerful work on the same theme (and one which actually has Black characters in it; there are none of any importance in "GSAW"), I suggest Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust" and the fine movie made from it.  It was published earlier than either Lee work, and I'd bet she was influenced by it.