Cancer Journal

 Magical thinking is defined as making a connection between two unrelated events where there's neither a causal link or even a correlation.  It's like thinking that Mason Crosby of the Green Bay Packers missed the field goal because you got up to go to the bathroom.  Actually it is more often a projection as in your deciding you'd better not go to the bathroom because if you do, Mason Crosby will miss the field goal. The author Joan Didion wrote a memoir about the last year of her husband's life entitled, The Year of Magical Thinking .  He had terminal cancer with no expectation of survival.  She describes what she called her magical thinking efforts to prevent the inevitable.  These included both wishing with great intensity and also following a pattern of virtuous behavior of her own devising.  Hmm.  Change the terms around and it sounds something like what I would do. I don't know if those wishes were directed at anything in particular.  I...

 I got an email from Jan Carroll yesterday, noting that there had been no blog entry for a while and asking if things were OK.  Bless the woman!  Yes, things are fine.  As I told her, nothing cancery has happened for a while.  Which is not totally true.  My PSA /# was checked on April 22 and it again came back as too low to be detectable. I realize there is a certain absence of dramatic tension to my story.  I can imagine an editor saying that it starts dragging at about pg.75.  I say, "What about praying for those women, what about fitness training?"  He says, "Don't confuse digression with narrative development.  You've got a story to tell.  Tell it!"  The manifest injustice of this instruction stuns me into silence.  That's just the thing.  I don't have a story to tell!  Unless there's a way to goose my PSA, I'm not gonna have a story to tell.  So unless digression can somehow become the story, the reader...

 I have more to say about my body.  I have lost 25 lbs. since my diagnosis in November.  I don't quite get it.  I've always overeaten;  big heaping platefuls of whatever which I finish up to the last bit.  The difference is that the heaping plate has boiled cabbage on it without a generous portion of red meat.  It's been quite a while since I've eaten red meat and I've been fine without it.  I still eat some chicken.  Also, since late February when I consulted with Dr Gering at Spero Wellness, I have pretty well limited my eating to an eight hour window in a 24 hour period.  No eating for several hours before I go to bed. Anyway, I'm skinnier now.  My skin has not snapped back from the last time I weighed 174 lbs.  A generous bunch of it on my upper arms gathered in fine wrinkles that looks a lot like what happens with old people.  It's hard to recognize as my own and startling whenever I see it.  But, I refuse to be ...

 I do fitness training twice a week with a trainer who has a space at Banbury Place in Eau Claire.  I've been going to him a little over a year, since before my diagnosis.  I spend an hour there, starting on a rowing machine, a stationary bike and a skiing machine and then I move on to diagonal pushups, planks, elastic band behind the back stuff and various other exercises all designed to put all my muscles groups to work.  He changes things up from session to session so more of my body is doing different things and maybe to keep me interested. I'm happy enough with the variety but he needn't worry about me losing interest.  I never actually enjoy it.  I get on that bike, I'm less than half way through the goal he has set and my body really wants to stop doing this.  I stay with it, it gets marginally better but there's big relief when I finish.  And then the nice sense of relaxed well-being that follows a workout.  I stay with it, going pret...