Chaplain on the Other Side of the Rail

    It has been a while again. Now, where was I? I am about 11 days into phase 2. Phase 2 started on my birthday, and it started off feeling like good news. For all that I was frustrated with my insurer over some things they hadn’t paid for, my co-pays on some very expensive drugs are surprisingly manageable. So, I got an injection to last me for 90 days and a bottle of pills, also to last me for 90 days, and the journey began. For the next almost a week, I would wake up every morning, and when Karen said to me, “How are you?“, my response would be, “Nol weirdness so far.“ There was a certain innocence in that. These are important medicines with systemic effects, and those effects take weeks to really take hold. If there had been sudden effects, that probably would’ve been bad. But the fact that there were no sudden bad effects didn’t mean they weren’t going to be any discomfort, any awareness that this was a difficult adjustment. So about a week in, I suddenly started f...

  I realize it has been a while since I have shared anything about my journey. Let me take a few minutes to catch up. I like this to a kitchen renovation. Phase one was dealing with the blocked ureter. Honestly, that seems to be going very well. i’ll have another ultrasound sometime before the end of the summer, but unless other symptoms come up, we will consider that matter addressed. I’m grateful at how well that went. Now, we get on. Phase 2 is not exactly like new construction. Rather, it’s about learning to live with some of the things that came from the construction.  Maybe, it’s like going from a gas stove to an induction stove. There are new tools that weren’t enough previously. There are new dishes, because the old ones weren’t meeting the need. I had a specialized PET scan. When you get a PET scan, it’s kind of like a CT scan with a particular kind of radiotracer. They injected me with the tracer, and I waited for about an hour, and once it had time to go ...