Remember me?

Wow! It's been over a month since I posted last. It's been a busy month, and one full of struggles.

My son had an unpleasant encounter with a "counselor" at Lebanon Pines, the long-term rehab facility he had been paroled to. Adam was pushing his limits, as he is wont to do, and the counselor decided to make it a power struggle. She lost her temper and told him to get out. He did.

This actually happened just before I left on my vacation to Provincetown--I just haven't had the heart to write about it yet. In the past six weeks, Adam has managed to get involved with some sort of "spiritual", cultish group, which made him mumble more or less incoherent things about true freedom and drink a lot. Somewhere in there he also shot heroin. Then he entered the detox program at Natchaug in Mansfield, and left rather earlier than he should have. Several days later, he regretted doing that, so he got himself committed to the psych section of Natchaug, on a 15-day "PEC" (physician's emergency certificate). He resisted the urge to ask for a probate hearing so he could get out before the 15 days were up, but then they let him go, saying his insurance (SAGA, CT's "general assistance" or welfare) wouldn't pay for him to stay any longer. The last time I talked to him, he was depressed and angry. Apparently something happened between him and his girlfriend. And so it goes.

I try not to let this stuff make me want to swallow rat poison, but sometimes it's hard.

The other thing that happened is that my CT/PET scan results seem to indicate that there's clearly an area of active cancer in my sternum. Both my oncologist and the radiologist think that perhaps I never really was in remission--that the "intense uptake" they've seen on the last three scans has always been cancer, rather than healing bone, as they initially thought. The good news is that the CT part of the scan indicates that the area hasn't grown at all in the past year.

And that is good news...but the whole thing was a shock, and then I was pretty bummed out for several days. I'm back to feeling like I have to hurry, hurry, hurry, to get everything done I hope to do before I die. It's like the goddamn sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

But I don't mean to whine. I know I'm lucky that the treatment is holding the cancer in check. Dr. Schauer, my oncologist, spoke to the radiologist about possible radiation to the sternum, but they agreed that since the cancer's stable, there's no good reason to subject me to a treatment that would almost surely damage my heart and lungs, since they're right behind the malignant area. So at this point my treatment isn't going to change at all.

Well, that's the update. I'm going to upload some of the art I've been doing over the past month, and then start writing my cute/acerbic/philosophical/chatty posts again. So if you've managed to slog all the way through this post, take heart; we'll soon be back to our regularly scheduled programming.