Yes, I really should know better. This is the pattern: I sense a marked improvement in my wellbeing. I start to do things. Maybe I do too much. I injure myself. Now I can’t do much again! Damn!

The problem is that I have myeloma, alright and I’m taking chemo meds, alright, but that doesn’t mean I will be distressed exclusively by cancer related issues. At the moment I’m experiencing pretty severe IT band pain. That means my left side, hip and upper leg are quite painful to the point of preventing me from sleeping. Of course I can take extra hydromorphone to alleviate the pain, but that has its consequences. If I take enough to get to sleep it’s like I have a hangover the next day. That’s not terribly pleasant and I don’t like it.

It’s so tempting, though, to do things! And there are lots of things to do. For instance, even though I shouldn’t be kneeling or getting down on the ground because of the lesions in my femur, I did that anyway while working to fix the irrigation in the garden a few days ago, just one of those things needing to get done. Now my back is chastising me for doing that, and it’s especially gleeful in its chastisements at 3 AM. As I sit here writing this, I can feel the pain slowly increasing in my lower back. I had surgery on my lower back about a hundred years ago, but the scar tissue still causes me pain now and again. Over the years I developed coping strategies to deal with lower back pain, but every once in a while my enthusiasm to get something done interferes with the caution I should be exercising in doing anything physical. I can still do things, but I just have to be smart about it. Unfortunately, sometimes my smarts abandon me and my frontal lobe meekly succumbs to the bullying from my amygdala. Brain wars. This part of my brain says “Yes, do that!” Another part says, “You know better than that!” Which brain part wins is sometimes a toss-up, but more often than not, the do-that part of my brain wins and my lower back sooner or later exacts the price. These days, as I get older and older, the price is exacted sooner than later and lasts way longer than I find reasonable.

I’m just coming to the end of my fifth chemo cycle. Today is a chemo day, but I only take one of the three drugs I normally take earlier in the cycle. So, no dex and no bortezomib. That means no dex high to counteract the cyclophosphamide downer that always happens on chemo day. Bummer. I got to looking forward to my dex days. I got a lot done on my dex days!

Today, I could barely do anything. We went out to the hospital lab this morning to prepare for my visits with doctors next week, then I waited in the car almost falling asleep while Carolyn did some shopping, first at Art Knapps (AK), then at Thrifty’s. I was pretty dozy, but I couldn’t sleep because I kept getting distracted by the parking lot antics of people coming and going from the stores. People coming and going from Art Knapp’s were quite entertaining. Apparently there is a number of people of all ages who shop at AK who can’t read or have attention-deficit issues. The new signage telling people that the former entrance is now an exit-only door flummoxed quite a few shoppers who couldn’t figure out the new rules.

Starbucks at Thrifty’s is still busy it seems. A number of people had coffees in hand as they got back into their cars. I was surprised at how many people came out of the store with only a couple of items in hand. One woman pulled up beside our car in a black twelve cylinder biturbo Mercedes hard top convertible, went into Thrifty’s just to come out a few minutes later with potted flowers, that’s it, just as a classy guy who parked his van across from us (clearly marked with his business name all over it) spit on the pavement every couple of steps he took as he walked towards the store, muttering to himself between spits. So much for shopping only once a week or being super cautious in Covid Times. How could I sleep with all this entertainment going on?

When we got home it was nap time. I slept for two hours. I hope I can sleep tonight after that.

Now, you can feast your eyes on this amazing forty year old wisteria that has a trunk at the front of the deck then snakes around along a structure about 7 feet off the ground for probably 10 metres. It’s beautifully aromatic and frames the table and chairs on the deck.

What better way to finish a blog post. Soon I will post a video of Carolyn’s amazing gardens. There’s no other way to show it off right now, so I’ve polished up my rudimentary video skills and enlisted my basic Sony video camera to put together a 20 minute video. I’m not a great narrator so I’m working on setting it up without talking too much. It’s Carolyn’s birthday on Monday so this video is partly a birthday present for her. Still in love after 47 years. It helps that we’re both a little crazy.