bearing that in mind

March 17, 2012

Mid-month crisis: Here as well as last month around this time, I experienced something of a septic cleanse accompanied by dizziness and heavy-headedness. By septic cleanse, I mean what you probably think I mean, so I’ll leave it at that. By dizziness, I mean the sensation that most everyone is familiar with, so I’ll leave it at that.

Heavy –headedness, however, I guess is a more peculiar phenomenon so I’ll try to explain. I associate the feeling with my tumor—a literal association, not psychosomatic. That is, I know the region of my tumor to be more massive, cellularly, than other regions of my brain of equal area, geometrically; and I know this by sensation as well as I know it by MRI pictures and by concomitant symptoms. Bearing that in mind . . . I said bearing that in mind . . .

Is this thing on? [virtual microphone taptaptap] Tough crowd. Anyway . . .

Bearing that in mind, the mass of the tumor actually weighs on my brain such that I can detect the additional fullness of my skull. Don’t misconstrue: I don’t walk around doubled over like a toddler with a five-foot pageant tiara on her head. It’s a slight sensation. A creepy, alien-movie-body-snatching-snaky-creature-gestation sensation. But slight. Even so, the brain’s got a hair-trigger action and slight’s enough to kill you soon as weigh on you and don’t even dream of beating its quick-draw, Huckleberry.

Add the septic cleanse and the dizziness and the dullardizing anticonvulsants to your big-boned glial cells and there you have your heavy-headedness.

While I’m making note of things lest I forget to mention them later on, I would like to report another alien sensation occurring in the opposite hemi-form of my body. No, not there or there—I’m talking about my left leg.

March 18, 2012

[I got distracted yesterday. Maybe by March Madness, maybe by my . . .

[. . .

[ . . . sorry, maybe by my propensity to become distracted. Whatever it was moved on to something else and so on. At any rate, back to my left leg . . .]

Sporadically throughout any given day, alternating muscles along my tibia and into my foot will tick and wince. While I prefer my involuntary bodily functions to be of the cardiopulmonary and metabolic ilk, these spasms are not particularly alien—I understand the physiology of musculature enough to not be alarmed. Beyond that, the following groups of people can attest to the relative wimpiness of ticks and winces: the ill-advised storm-golfers, the fork-to-socket young scientists, the cow-fence hooligan-urinators, the electro-shocked-depressed-and/or-crazies of the beat generation as bemoaned by Allen Ginsberg and portrayed by Jack Nicholson, and, more relevantly I’ll presume to my readers, the epileptic, the palsied, and the tonic and/ or clonic spastic (<----my team), et. al.

But there’s another left leg aberration to report. Allow me to return to the alien movie analogy. You know the ones. A small, maggoty, preternatural life-form slinks into the human host via some unguarded orifice and wriggles its pernicious way along the human’s winding entrails until it settles in for its hyper-gestation after which period the uncanny creature bubbles beneath the host’s skin like a bunny down a python’s throat preparing for its vicious birth.

Kind of like that but in my lower leg. Off-putting. Self-diagnosis: The retaliation of a rudely awakened limb from its sedentary slumber. That is, physical therapy. After varying degrees of uselessness and trauma over the past ten years, my poor left leg has been called into action. Far-flung diagnosis: My tumor is shrinking by small degrees and the portside of my body is slowly, not rudely as above, awakening proportionately. Knock on whatever this IKEA desk is actually made of.

More briefly, 2 additional notes: I have reason to believe that my sense of taste is being affected by the chemotherapy; I’ll keep this journal and its sparse readership apprised. Nextly, I have lost 6 pounds since my last weigh-in. And this with a full beard and my glasses on. Attribute to a diminished appetite and more consciously getting off my duff now and then.