A Health Update

I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this contraption: a fluoroscope. Lovely to look at, less lovely to lie on. Every week, they used this machine to tap into my spine, extract 5 mg of fluid for analysis, and replace it with 5 mg of methotrexate. There was only a local anesthetic during the procedure and the hardest part was knowing that there was a needle, turned up to eleven, going into my back. It was afterwards that things got dicey: the nerves in your spine float in a thecal sac filled with spinal fluid that acts as a kind of insulator. Since we were exchanging the fluids, it was easy for the levels to get out of balance and for the nerves to react. The result were the worst headaches I’ve ever experienced. The…