We arrived at Four Winds Cancer Clinic early for our 8 a.m. appointment with Dr. Sud. Truth is I am always a little apprehensive in advance of the all-day chemo treatment, not because of the treatment itself so much as because I am at my best the week before it and I will be at my worst for the week to follow it. Inject your vascular system with multiple chemotherapies, anti-nausea drugs, magnesium, and steroids for six or seven hours, then slap on another chemo treatment in a 24/7 slow release fanny pack that you wear for two more days and nights, and it tends to wear the body down.

As readers of my blog know, one result for me has been is a low white blood count that gets countered on Thursdays with another injection that excites my bone marrow to work harder, but that by Friday produces aches and pains that with Advil gets dulled down to near zero over the weekend. By the following Wednesday, or one week after the fanny pack is removed, I am usually less affected by chemo brain and the chemo sweats, and feeling just fine and dandy. Just in time to anticipate the next all-day treatment on the following Monday. Or, as will be the case because we are at the 2/3 milestone, another series of CT-scans, blood work, and a bone marrow scan. Sigh.

The good news is that by the time you read this blog Round 8 of 12 will be history, except for the scans. The end of the chemo treatments is in sight! I am ready – and San is ready – to be done with this part of our journey into Cancerland.

***

Last year at this most merry of holiday (holy-day) seasons, we were back in Alabama visiting our relatives and enjoying the hospitality of San’s folks, Martha and Clarence Bray. I was in high political mode, having just published a book Counter-Narrative to great reviews by progressives and predictably panned by right-wingers.

So, because one of my all-time favorite Christmas stories is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I then wrote a series of political blogs that brought Scrooge into the 21^stcentury as what in this year’s fashion we would call one of the 1%. My version begins:

Ebenezer Scrooge, Teapublican from Down There, tallied his books for 2010 with a self-satisfied smile.  It had been a good year, a very good year.  His disinformation business, funded by the Brothers Koch and popularized by his old pal Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda outlets had succeeded in convincing an increasingly docile electorate of many false things.  That the world was not warming and those who said it was were dreaded socialists; that health care for all was really a liberal government takeover that would lead to—he licked his oversized lips—“death panels”; that increased regulation of the oil and food industries was further evidence of the government’s unwarranted intrusion into their lives and profits; and that lowering taxes for the rich—including himself, of course—was as important to the maintenance of democracy as slop was to the maintenance of pigs.  Oink!  He smiled.  Yes, this had been a very good year!