The Writer's Blog

I'm just popping in to write a quick update and say hello. Over the last four months my life has revolved around the cancer diagnosis I received at the very beginning of the year and that makes for a pretty small life. I'm bored with it, so it's not my intention to bore readers with lots of detail about the cancer journey. So I'll sum up:

A week ago I had the last of the eight chemotherapy treatments I've undergone in the past four months. They occurred every other week, usually leaving me a few days of feeling almost normal before it was time for the next treatment. I'll characterize it this way – it was an ordeal, but it was manageable. I spent some of it glued to the couch and unable to do anything else. I spent some of it feeling pretty good. And I spent the majority of the time feeling crappy, but not crappy enough to stay on the couch or good enough to want to do anything. It was a sort of limbo that I found more psychologically tortuous than physically debilitating. I have a lifelong voice in my head telling me I should be doing something productive ALL THE TIME. That voice faced a formidable foe – the voice that told me that going to the grocery store would be the extent of my activity for the day. The noise in my head has been a bit deafening.

I'm still feeling the side effects of the last treatment, but soon that will fade. I'm left with a lot of fatigue, something I'm told will take a long time to recover from, but fatigue without feeling 'chemo sick' doesn't seem so bad. My body will have about six weeks to rest up before I have surgery in late June. The extent of the surgery is still to be determined, as is the possibility of undergoing radiation treatment after the surgery. I haven't really thought much about either of these next steps. My AA training in living one day at a time has truly been helpful in dealing with cancer treatment. If I thought of it all at once I'd feel crushed. It's a long haul.

I'll be doing some promotion for Runaway starting next week, which makes me happy. I've not been very involved in the launch of my new book, and that has felt like a loss. My schedule can be found in the Events page of the website.

I've also managed to write a short story, It Only Occurred to Me Later, while undergoing treatment. You can read it by clicking here.

That's it for now. I'll be back.