Slow, foggy, and out of control

It's been a tough week.

Friday night I broke our tea kettle.  I knocked it off the stove, and when it landed on the floor the handle snapped in two.  Big deal, you might think.  It's just a tea kettle.  But I really like our tea kettle.  Dare I even say that I love our tea kettle.  Short of our knives, it may be the single most used item in the kitchen.  And it took us a while to find one we were satisfied with.  Perhaps you can't imagine how many poorly designed tea kettles there are.  Or maybe you just can't imagine how opinionated I am about product design.  And while I somewhat make fun of people who obsess over how kitchen items look, I have to say that it was a very nice shade of red -- that goes very well with our Kitchen Aid stand mixer.  And somehow I just knew that it wouldn't be made any more (I was right).

It wasn't just the tea kettle.  Earlier the same day I broke the glass pitcher of our french press (which also we primarily use for making tea).  Just a few days prior I broke our large cast iron skillet (I didn't even know that was possible).  And a drinking glass.

I suppose the tea kettle was the final straw.  I leaned over, buried my head down on the counter in my arms, and I was literally sobbing.  Pathetic, I know.  And entirely irrational.  It's just a thing.  Not even a very expensive thing.  I could tell at the time that I was being irrational.  But that didn't really help.

And it's not just that I've been fragile emotionally.  The trend of each cycle being progressively more difficult physically is sadly continuing.  My most manifest problem is fatigue.  Even when I manage to get a decent night's sleep, and even though I'm generally napping or at least laying down resting for some time each day, I'm very lacking in energy.  I was so happy to be biking again and practicing yoga again, but right now those are once again on hold.  Perhaps by week 3.

Also, I finally had a weekly checkup that wasn't uneventful.  Which isn't a good thing.  My total white blood count, and specifically my absolute neutrophil, are very low.  Which means that I have a significantly increased risk of infection.  So I'm back on antibiotics.

Despite all of this, I did manage to get myself into an okay enough state to take advantage of the coincidence that multiple friends that have since moved away from the Bay area were all in town visiting at the same time this past week -- Neal (who I went to grad school with, was a housemate with at the legendary Avocado Lounge, and worked with at FastForward); Noky (who I originally know from way back when I worked at DEC, and was also a housemate at the Avocado); and Sarah Reznikoff (also from grad school, although she was in Math, not CS).

I'm now about halfway done cycle 7, and things are noticeably improving.  But it's highly variable.  Early Friday evening I took Dylan out with his bike (I bought him a balance bike recently) while Lorien went to the market and cooked dinner.  Unlike earlier expeditions with the bike, in which we confined ourselves to the block right in front of our house, and in which he actually was on the bike the majority of the time, somehow we ended up walking about 3.5 blocks from home, downhill, and he had mostly lost interest in being on the bike.  And I started to feel pretty crappy, and really just wanted to go home.  So I've got me, a somewhat not entirely cooperative Dylan, his bike, his sippy cup, and my water bottle.  And I want to get us all home.  It really shouldn't have been that much of a problem.  At the very least, I could just pick Dylan's bike up in one hand (it's ridiculously light), Dylan in the other (he's admittedly getting a little less light), and hold the bottles with my fingers.  But I just didn't have the energy.  I ended up kind of just giving up and sitting down on the sidewalk, and we made our way home at toddler pace.  Very slowly.  With many distractions.  In retrospect, perhaps I should have had Lorien come rescue us.  Because I was feeling pretty bad by the time we finally made it home.  But that just kind of seemed too lame to ask for at the time.

Despite Friday night's disasters (the same eve as the tea kettle incident), I woke up on Saturday morning with a somewhat surprising amount of energy.  I had assumed I wouldn't be up for it, but I ended up changing my mind and heading into San Fransisco to catch a showing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.  If you've never seen a silent film on the big screen with live accompaniment, I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance.  The SF festival is at the beautiful Castro Theatre, and Lorien and I typically see one selection each year.  But we concluded this year that the logistics would be too difficult with Dylan, and it wasn't really worth paying for babysitting for.  What I went to was a collection of silent Felix the Cat cartoons.  When I was very young, I was somewhat obsessed with Felix the Cat.  To the point of throwing a tantrum and insisting on leaving the swimming pool early so that I wouldn't miss the TV show.  (Which I should probably keep in mind when I complain about Dylan's recent obsession with Big Bird.)  Following the cartoons, I went to a birthday brunch at Heather's apartment, which was fairly near by in the city.

And today I felt well enough to do a little bit of yard work, and to again resume going through the backlog of pictures that I have yet to process.  (Isn't this picture adorable?)  So it's not all doom and gloom, and I'm sorry if this posting has been a bit of a downer.  But I do think I'm getting a bit more of a feel of what typical chemo side effects are like.  I'm really glad it hasn't been 6 straight months of this.

I should also note that the tea kettle incident had a somewhat happy ending.  I was able to find one of the exact same models on ebay.  It's even red.