Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon
Friday gratefuls: Cool nights. Good sleep. Those Nuggets! Jokic and Murray. The Spanish Grand Prix. OK, shoot me, I can be a guy, too. Mussar. New metaphors for God or God as metaphor. Yourself as metaphor. Cancer. Griff and neuro-muscular massage. Diane in Ohio. Mark O. in Aspen with Dennis. Brother Mark exercising his eye with his camera. Mary coming here in mid-June. Jon Bailey, mobile car detailer. June 10. Getting details done on Israel trip, Korea. Brining tenderized Chicken tenders. Disinfecting my cutting boards in the sunlight. Seoah’s influence. Three days with little on the calendar. House chores. The Grand Prix. Like that.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow Mountain Home with its art mostly hung.
One brief shining: You know sports basketball motor sports baseball football watching somebody else do something they are really, really good at can become an all consuming self-absorbing activity so passive so self-denying what would anybody watch me do that I am really, really good at you know pay good money sit in the nosebleed seats to see me handle my fingers on a keyboard I don’t know or sit down and listen to someone, listen hard for the big prize maybe sit in my chair reading with great concentration no I don’t think so.
For all you cancer watchers out there. New PSA is in. Still undetectable. Testosterone well below 10. I feel great, more energy. Lost five pounds. Kristie, oncology p.a., says the drug holiday looks like a go sometime in August, starting probably before I take off for Korea. The drug holiday is necessary because the androgen deprivation therapy drugs I’m on, Erleada and Orgovyx, wane in effectiveness if you’re on them too long. During the drug holiday my testosterone will bounce back which should give me more energy. Although. It also gives my dormant cancer cells food.
The question then becomes how well the drugs have pushed those cells into quiescence. Apparently in rare cases the PSA never starts to rise again. A sort of cure. That was the concept in radiating the two possible sites of active cancer in my lymph node and on my T3 vertebrae. Kill those active sites and if the other, less energetic cells stay quiet my PSA may stay down. Possibly for ever. Not counting on that though I would be pleased of course. The other benefit of killing those active sites is that even if my PSA does start to rise it should not be as soon as it would have been if those sites still existed.
Even if my PSA stays down for a good while, I’ll still have to have regular blood draws for PSA levels. Because my cancer will never be gone now, but it might stay quiet for a long time. May it be so.
Thought about going down to Brooks Tavern last night to watch the Nuggets game. Covid wariness and my general evening inertia found me following the game through regular updates on my phone. This could be the start of something big for the home team.