Pianos, biking, hair, and other stuff

Yes, this post has a few random things that are only vaguely related.  Not that the title is any more random than Guns Fishing & Other Stuff.

I've settled into a bit of a routine with respect to medical appointments, and have scheduled things out to August.  For the most part I have something every Wednesday, and then sometimes I also have something on Thursday (every third week, the day after chemo).  As I'm walking through the lobby for my most recent appointment (which was fairly uneventful from a medical perspective), I hear what sounds like a piano playing.  But then I was kind of confused, and wondering if it was just coming over the PA, since I was having trouble attempting to locate the source by ear.  It turns out there's a piano on the lower level of the atrium, at the bottom of the stairs.  And the quality of the piano and the layout of the building and the positioning of the piano actually make for some pretty good acoustics.  Not to mention that the guy playing it was pretty good.  (He was playing something kind of jazzy, but with a bit of a ragtime feel.)  So even though I was done my appointment in what was I think record time, I hung out for a few more minutes listening to this guy play.  And then when he was done, I gave it a try and played for a little while.  It felt good, although I'm out of practice.  I really ought to play more.  It's a bit complicated by the fact that Dylan generally insists on sitting besides me and playing along if I play on my keyboard at home -- which I suppose I can't complain about too much.  The experience was also interesting in that it was the second time in the same day that I got to play on a real piano.  We took Dylan in the morning to an open toddler play session that the city of Berkeley has, and there was a piano there as well.  While the Berkeley piano is bigger (a small baby grand vs. an upright at the hospital), the hospital piano is much nicer (I think it was a Steinway).

I've been biking quite a bit more, and I think it's starting to make a difference.  I'm not exclusively riding my bike (and that wasn't even the case before I got sick), but I have returned to the point where my bike is my default transportation method if I want to go somewhere local that's beyond walking distance.  That includes my medical appointments now that I've moved my cancer care from Oakland to Berkeley.  I still haven't gotten on my road bike and gone up into the hills for real, but the hilly parts of the flats and the foothills are starting to feel a bit more routine.  This week I had an appointment for an eye exam at the UC Berkeley Optometry school, and biking there takes me all the way to the western edge of campus, which is definitely starting to get up in elevation a little bit.  The week before I had biked there as well, to look at new glasses.  (After a bit of an exhaustive search, I just ordered my first set of new frames in more than a decade yesterday.  I'll post pics when they come in.)  Anyway, while some of the difference might be due to my cold having continued to diminish asymptotically, it definitely felt like an easier ride a week later.  And after browsing through the Cheeseboard cookbook during a period of late night munchies last night, I had the motivation to bike there this morning (which is also somewhat uphill) to get some baked goods for breakfast, and it felt shockingly invigorating, even though I hadn't eaten yet.  Maybe sometime soon I'll even have the energy to start towing Dylan again.  Lately when we've gone biking as a family, Lorien is the one with Dylan in tow.

After the vast majority of the hair on my head fell out around the time of chemo round 2, I assumed that each successive round would see an exponential decay in the amount of hair remaining.  But that's not really what's happened.  I seem to have stabilized with a thin layer of hair, somewhat all around my head, but mostly concentrated at the top.  Maybe I'm just starting to get a bit more used to it, but it doesn't actually look all that bad.  (Sorry, no pic available currently.)  After pretty much wearing some hat (I think I have 5 of them that I've been wearing with some regularity) almost all of the time, I've started sometimes to not bother with a hat.  Yesterday when I went out to look at some glasses, I didn't actually realize that I wasn't wearing a hat until I tried on a frame and then went over to a mirror to look at myself.  At first I was kind of annoyed that I forgot my hat (I did want to see how the frames looked with it), but I ended up sticking with it and not wearing any hat the entire day.  Which is probably the first day I've done that since losing my hair.

On the topic of hair, it's been largely limited to my head.  I think maybe some of my body hair has thinned somewhat, but it's kind of hard to tell.  I don't really have any easy way of comparing before and after.  I certainly didn't have any kind of crazy coming out in clumps experience that I did with the hair on my head.  And I definitely have not lost things like eyelashes and eyebrows.  Although most of my facial hair is gone.  But not all of it.  So I still have to shave every now and then to keep from getting a scattering of stubble.

It's currently week 3 of round 3, so I'm pretty much at my peak of feeling well.  I'm having some trouble sleeping continuously through the night, but I'm falling asleep both initially and getting back to sleep without too much trouble, so it's not all that bad.  And Lorien has been doing the vast majority of child care in the mornings, and letting me sleep in, which is doing wonders for how well I feel.  Although it is making me feel a bit guilty.

For a while I was blaming it on the cold, but as that has receeded, I've noticed how much my voice is just generally hoarse lately.  It's a bit of a stress to talk too much.  Which can be a problem sometimes... :)  It's especially a little sad in that it's a bit of a strain when I read to Dylan.  Dylan has a decent collection of Dr. Seuss books, and he's somewhat recently gone from being mostly limited to short board books to wanting to hear full length real books.  Again and again.  It's really cute when he refers to them with one word names (e.g. "hat" for Cat in the Hat; "fish" for One Fish, Two Fish; "ham" for Green Eggs and Ham), and he specifically asks for them by name.  (He also asks for other books by name, like "poop" for Everyone Poops.)  Anyway, I really love the rhyming rhythm of the Dr. Seuss books, and had been looking forward for a long time to him being willing to sit through them in their entirety.  So it's a bit disappointing for me.  But I end up just sucking it up and dealing with it to some extent -- I don't want to stop reading to Dylan just because I have a little bit of a sore throat.

We're back to some warm weather again after yet another bit of rain.  The rain has certainly caught up later in season after an initially extremely dry winter.  So tomorrow's tentative plan is a family bike ride down to the Berkeley Marina, including some kite flying if there's sufficient wind.  Which is sometimes inversely proportional to the temperature, so we'll have to see how that plan goes.