February 26, 2017

On the medical side of things there is some improvement and some stasis.  My dysgeusia seems to be diminishing.  That is the condition of having an unpleasant taste in your mouth for sustained periods of time, sometimes all day.  The taste just arises from nowhere in particular.  In my case it is as though I have the after taste of having just eaten a spoon of salt.  My other taste problem, the inability to taste any food or drink, remains although there may be some slight glimmers of improvement  At this point it is a little early to see significant change.  The whole subject of how we experience taste is more complicated than I ever would have thought.  A matter for me to put on my already too long reading list.

My energy is slowly returning.  This coming week I'll  start testing that with some exercising.  The loss of energy as radiotherapy progresses is very surreptitious and its' return seems to be the same
Cetuximab with which I was treated has had the side effect of causing my eyebrows to lengthen and become bushier with some curling and twisting.  My "normal" eyebrows were already noticeably bushy.  I now appear to have a small unkempt animal living above each eye.

I believe I said in an earlier posting that having cancer has not changed the course of my life but has rather confirmed for me the course I was already on.   The passage of time is affirming that.  We know, or should know, that many of the things of life that  we get caught up in are not that important.  However, we keep on getting caught up in them anyhow.   My mindfulness/Buddhist practice has helped to sort these things out.  Arriving in one's seventies and receiving a potentially life threatening diagnosis helps one to strip away even more of the extraneous and even more quickly.  Susan Cheever commenting on the effect a meeting with e.e. cummings had on her said, "I saw that being right was a petty goal - being free is the thing to aim for."